Saturday, January 17, 2015

Wanted - A tool to chop Pinboard HTML export into Spotlight searchable HTML files

Pinboard provides a nice range of export options including XML, JSON and HTML.

The HTML export uses the ancient Netscape bookmark file standard (I love simple, ancient standards). My 10MB export file starts like this:

Screen Shot 2015 01 17 at 10 44 23 AM

There are also XML and JSON versions:

Screen Shot 2015 01 17 at 10 50 03 AM

Screen Shot 2015 01 17 at 10 49 09 AM

I’d like to follow the example of my nvAlt/Simplenote archive [1] and have every bookmark as a Spotlight searchable file. The HTML file seems the easiest to process — wrap each DT/DD pair with HTML tags and save to file system with the file name taken from the Initial “Description” text field (truncate at nn characters, append ADD_DATE to make unique).

Seems like something somebody could whip out in AppleScript or Python and then sell on the Mac App store for a few dollars. Wouldn’t make a fortune, but I think Maciej Ceglowski would add this to the Pinboard Resources page. So maybe good for a few hundred bucks?

- fn -

[1] Simplenote is all-but-dead today. The beauty of the nvAlt (or Notational Velocity) and Simplenote system is that one can easily transition to Dropbox and something like Notesy, and all notes are available on my Mac and Spotlight indexed with all metadata all the time. That means I can hang with dead Simplenote, just like I hang with dead Aperture. It helps that Brett Terpstra’s (not free) nvAlt replacement is almost here…

 

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