Import Existing Bookmarks into Yahoo! Bookmarks

Import Existing Bookmarks into Yahoo! Bookmarks

To consolidate or build a Bookmark library quickly, you can import existing bookmarks from applications such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, or web applications that support OPML.

Yahoo! lets you store up to 1,000 bookmarks on their server, making them easily accessible from any computer. But transferring or creating 1,000 bookmarks by hand could take you a few months of concentrated effort and some vacation time from work. Even with one-click adding [Hack #28], you're looking at a few hours of solid clicking to even approach the limit.

Luckily, you can take advantage of the bookmarks you already have by importing them. Yahoo! provides some tools to make the process of importing bookmarks take a few minutes rather than a few months. Also, if you use other bookmark-like applications on the Web (such as Blogrolling, Bloglines, or Kinja) you can probably find a way to import them into Yahoo! Bookmarks by using exporting features those applications provide.

Each of these hacks relies on the Import Bookmarks feature that you'll find at your Yahoo! Bookmarks (at http://bookmarks.yahoo.com, toward the top of the page).

Internet Explorer Bookmarks

Importing your Internet Explorer bookmarks is a fairly painless process, thanks to an ActiveX Control Yahoo! has put together that's appropriately called Yahoo! Favorites Importer. To get to the import page, click Import Bookmarks from the Yahoo! Bookmarks page and choose the Internet Explorer for Windows link.

An ActiveX Control is a bit of code that runs in your browser and that can interact with your desktop applications. As you might guess, there are some security concerns with this type of code, so you might see a warning in your browser like the one shown in Figure.

Go ahead and click on the yellow-highlighted area, and then choose Install ActiveX Control…. Once it's installed, click the Import Favorites button, and all of your folders and bookmarks will be added to your Yahoo! Bookmarks.

Import Bookmarks ActiveX warning

Firefox Bookmarks

Importing Firefox or Netscape bookmarks is a two-step process. First, you need to export your Firefox bookmarks to an HTML file. From any browser window, choose Bookmarks Manage Bookmarks to bring up the Firefox bookmark manager. From there, choose File Export. The default name for the file is bookmarks.html; be sure to save it in a location you'll remember.

Next, back at Yahoo! Bookmarks, click the Import Bookmarks link and then click Netscape (the label is a relic from the Netscape browser that Firefox grew out of). Click the Browse button at the bottom of the page, and find bookmarks.html on your local computer. Finally, click Import Bookmarks, and Yahoo! will do the heavy lifting from there. You should now find all of your bookmarks and bookmark folders in your Yahoo! Bookmarks.

OPML Applications

Browsers aren't the only place you'll find lists of sites. With the rising popularity of web-based RSS readers and link-sharing services, many people have lists of favorite links in many different formats across the Web. Fortunately for us, an emerging standard of exchanging links between applications exists. This standard is an XML format called Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML). OPML is used for making lists of just about anything, but it's used primarily for trading lists of links.

Yahoo! doesn't import OPML files, so the trick to importing bookmarks stored in OPML is to convert an existing OPML file into the Firefox/Netscape bookmark format. Rogers Cadenhead ran into this same problem and created a program called the OPML Link Publisher (http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/code/opmlLinkPublisher). The OPML Link Publisher takes an OPML file and converts it into the proper HTML for bookmarks. With these tools, you can import bookmarks from just about anywhere.

For example, I use the RSS reader Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com). This application lets me assemble a list of sites I read on a regular basis and alerts me when something new has been posted. To get an OPML list of your Bloglines sites, go to your feeds and click Edit from the top menu. Scroll past your list of feeds and choose Export Subscriptions. You'll find a list of all of your subscriptions in OPML format. Save it somewhere handy, such as your C: drive, and give it a name you'll remember, such as bloglines_export.xml.

Because OPML is an evolving standard, you might need to massage the file a bit to turn it into a format that OPML Link Publisher expects. Though most implementations of OPML for bookmarks are similar, there are enough differences to make them seem incompatible. For example, OPML Link Publisher looks for text and url attributes in the XML, while Bloglines gives you title and htmlUrl attributes. A quick fix is to open the file in Notepad and do a global search and replace for these terms. It's a bit of a hassle, but it's far faster than building your own bookmarks file.

Once the OPML file is ready to go, download a copy of Cadenhead's OPML Link Publisher and create the required olp.properties file in the same directory as the application. Then, edit the newfile to contain the location of your OPML file to be converted and the location of the resulting bookmarks.html file. The olp.properties file should look something like this:

	olp.mozillaUserFolder=C:/
	olp.bookmarkSource=C:/bloglines_export.xml

With these pieces in place, you can run OPML Link Publisher from a Windows command prompt, like so:

	javajar OPMLLinkPublisher.jar

If everything goes as expected, you should have a shiny new bookmarks.html file you can use to import your links at Yahoo! Bookmarks. Yahoo! never has to know the file wasn't generated by Firefox, and you get to have instant access to all of your favorite sites.