Bookmarks. I’ve got a lot of them. I’ve got a few I use often. Sometimes I think the chief value of bookmarks is that I can park something there and pretend like I’ll have it when I want it.<p> For the moment, I’ve signed up for a Pinboard account, and I loaded all my Google Chrome bookmarks into it. Now I’ve got to come up with a policy for what goes into Pinboard and what goes into my browser bookmarks.<p> I tried using a Chrome extension to synch Pinboard with Chrome bookmarks. It sounds like a good idea. The problem is that Chrome uses folders to organize, and Pinboard uses tags to organize. Pinboard synch takes a rational approach. It maps a folder to a tag, 1 for 1. So if you have a bookmark B, in folder F in Chrome, it lands in Pinboard as a bookmark B tagged with F. So far, so good.<p> But what happens when you tag B with F, G, and H? It winds up in Chrome in folder F, folder G, and folder H. Not so good, but tolerable.<p> But what happens if you have bookmark B, and it is stored in folder F, which is a sub-folder of G, which is a subfolder of H? i.e. H/G/F/B.

• First it syncs to Pinboard with tags H, G, and F.
• Then in syncs back to Chrome in folders H, G, and F.
• Then you realize that it just flattened your folders into a single level, and you restore from your Xmarks backup. </ul> So here's how i'm going to decide what goes into Pinboard and what goes into Chrome.
  • If I use it frequently, it goes into Chrome.
  • If it is a bookmarklet, it goes into Chrome.
  • If it is something that applies only to the local compter (e.g. a file:// URL), it goes into Chrome.
  • Everything other than bookmarklets and local URLs goes into Pinboard. </ul> What I'd like is to have a way to replicate Chrome bookmarks into Pinboard, tagged as from-Chrome, and if I delete a bookmark in Chrome which is tagged solely as from-Chrome, the delete gets replicated too. I'd happily settle for replicating new/changed bookmarks to Pinboard. (I can live with deletes that didn't happen.)

    I don't see how to make that happen using off-the-shelf tools. I could cobble together something -- perhaps a Perl script run from cron to download from Xmarks and push to Pinboard (without creating duplicates).

    While Xmarks doesn't offer a proper API, you can get an RSS feed by selecting "Classic View" (not "Grid View"), selecting your top-level Bookmarks folder, and clicking "Share" on the toolbar.