I wanted to send all new bookmarks from my browser to pinboard/delicious. I wanted to be browser independent. I discovered that it is pretty easy to do this via Xmarks and a shell script. I run the following script from cron.
<pre> #!/bin/bash ########################################################

‘Synchronize’ xmarks to pinboard/delicious.

What it really does is to replicate NEW xmarks bookmarks to pinboard.

One-way – just adds.

The first time, it pushes nothing, and saves the current state, against which future deltas are measured.

#

I really wanted to synchronize my browser bookmarks to pinboard, but I couldn’t find

an easy API for pulling bookmarks from Chrome, so I went via xmarks.

#######################################################

Customize the following variables

XMARKS_RSS_FEED=http://share.xmarks.com/folder/rss/notmyrealcode EMAIL_ADDR=yourname@example.com PINBOARD_ID=YourPinboardUserName PINBOARD_PASSWORD=YourPassword SITE_NAME=pinboard.in #SITE_NAME=del.icio.us.com

######## END Customize ###############################

THIS_SCRIPT=basename $0 TEMP_SCRIPT=/tmp/$THIS_SCRIPT.phase2.sh DATA_DIR=~/.sync-xml2pin XMARKS_FILE=sorted-xmarks.txt

if ! [ -r $DATA_DIR ] ; then mkdir $DATA_DIR ; fi

#######################################################

Helper routine, for reading XML files.

####################################################### read_xml () { local IFS=> read -d < ENTITY CONTENT }

####################################################### ####################################################### fail () { printf “%s\n” “$1” exit 1 }

#######################################################

Fetch xmarks bookmarks and convert them to a line-oriented format.

####################################################### wget –user-agent=”$EMAIL_ADDR” -O- -o /tmp/wget.log
$XMARKS_RSS_FEED | while read_xml ; do if [ “$ENTITY” != title ] ; then continue ; fi TITLE=”$CONTENT”

    read_xml
    if [ "$ENTITY" != "/title" ] ; then fail "Fatal error in file structure. Expecting /title.  Found $ENTITY" ; fi

    read_xml
    if [ "$ENTITY" != link ] ; then fail "Fatal error in file structure. Expecting /title.  Found $ENTITY" ; fi
    LINK="$CONTENT"
    echo "TITLE='$TITLE'|LINK='$LINK'"

done |
sort -u > /tmp/$XMARKS_FILE

########################################################################## if ! [ -r $DATA_DIR/$XMARKS_FILE ] ; then cp /tmp/$XMARKS_FILE $DATA_DIR echo “Current state of xmarks captured. Nothing pushed to $SITE_NAME this time.” fail “If you wanted to push ALL your xmarks to pinboard instead, replace $DATA_DIR/$XMARKS_FILE with an empty file, and re-run.” fi

##########################################################################

Use ‘comm’ to show lines that only exist in second file (xmarks).

This ensures that we only deal in newly added xmarks.

#

Use sed to alter those lines to be more useful for posting to pinboard.

Write commands to insert new bookmarks to pinboard, into a shell script.

#

“sort -u” is there to prevent adding the same bookmark more than once,

if it got added to the browser more than once. This is actually common, since

I use FreshStart and frequently save sessions.

If I attempt to re-add a bookmark, it replaces the old one, so duplicate adds

just waste time; they don’t create duplicates.

########################################################################## comm -13 $DATA_DIR/$XMARKS_FILE /tmp/$XMARKS_FILE | sort -u | sed “ s/TITLE=’/description=/ s/’|LINK=’/\&url=/ s/’$// s/ /%20/g s/:/%3A/g s|/|%2F|g s/\?/%3F/g s/"/%22/g s/ /%20/g s/’/%27/g s/«/%AB/g s/»/%BB/g s/$/\&shared=no/ s/$/\&tags=xmarks_push/ “ | sed ‘s/”/%22/g’ | grep -v ‘url=javascript’ | while read LINE ; do if [[ $LINE =~ http ]] ; then URL=”https://${PINBOARD_ID}:${PINBOARD_PASSWORD}@api.pinboard.in/v1/posts/add?${LINE}” echo “wget –user-agent="${EMAIL_ADDR}" -O- -a /tmp/wget.log –no-check-certificate ‘$URL’ | grep ‘result code="done"’ > /dev/null” echo “ if [ $? != 0 ] ; then echo ‘FAILED: $LINE’ else echo ‘SUCCESS: $LINE’ fi sleep 2 “ fi done > $TEMP_SCRIPT cp /tmp/$XMARKS_FILE $DATA_DIR/$XMARKS_FILE </pre></code>

Piece of cake. It isn't elegant. There are definitely cases where I'll need to add additional sed edits. But it gets the job done.