I was finding it difficult to use effectively anyway and to tag entries effectively -  I needed to clean up my delicious.com bookmarks and tags. They were a particular mess from when I let the delicious Firefox extension import all my thousands of browser bookmarks.

My meticulous offline browser bookmark filing system – a methodical and hierarchical and usable top-down organisation structure – fell down when it was converted to a soup of tags. I ended up with a collection of tags like work-siteredesignexamples (from some research at work) and PatternGroupD:WritingandManagingContent (some resources I’d bookmarked from a book I was reading a few years back – The Design of Sites) and _curr (my current reading bookmarks list, which was no longer very _curr). My labelling system for storing and browsing my tags was good for reading through the list in my browser sidebar, but for topic tags, it was pretty useless. And there were thousands of them.

No problem, I thought. delicious is a good product – well designed and tech-friendly. I’ll get in there and consolidate my tags, rename them, delete the ones I don’t like. Maybe with a bit of help from the delicious API and some scripting with regexes. It will be fun!

How wrong I was. The delicious ‘bulk edit’ interface is less than friendly, allowing you only to bulk edit bookmarks, maximum 100 at a time. The tag deleting and renaming interface allows you to do one tag at a time, with a painful select menu and multiple click interface. The pain of this interface is nicely documented here. I can’t be alone, I thought. And indeed, a google search reveals I am not the first to curse over this issue.

I discovered some scripts and tools that could possibly help. This merge tool looked good, and clever, but didn’t quite work for what I was trying to do. Scripted Re-Mark looks sophisticated, but I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted either. This multi-step use of tag bundles looks like a potential winner, but I had already completed  my job by the time I stumbled on that link.  I looked at the Delicious API, and considered writing something that would at least get rid of the worst offending tags (those over a certain length, those starting with an underscore, and some date-specific tags), and I would write a timer to fire every 2 seconds to get around the limits of using the API. Not as fun as I thought it would be, but educational, and a good exercise maybe. I even considered dropping delicious for another service. Diigo.com was the best alternative I found, and I set up an account and did some tests,  but I wasn’t convinced by it, although its tag editing interface is better.

But in the end, before I deleted my delicious account and recreated it to start again from scratch (apparently the quickest way to reset your account),  I solved it with the following bit of manual labour (It took a couple of runs to get right, each step has it’s caveats and just my luck, delicious actually crashed in the middle of my work):

• Backed up all my browser and delicious bookmarks.
• Removed all the imported bookmarks from a copy of the delicious backup file by searching for and deleting all private bookmarks. (I had followed the default in the import process and marked all imports as private, which was lucky). This allowed me to keep my Real Delicious bookmarks I had collected over the years.
• Re-organised my browser bookmarks with folder names suitable to tagging and backed up to a new file.
• Manually deleted all my Delicious bookmarks, 100 at a time, using the ‘bulk edit’ tool. Thankfully delicious doesn’t keep  zero-count tags with no bookmarks associated with them, so once I finished this, I had an empty account with no tags or bookmarks.
• Reimported my Real Delicious Bookmarks and my Reorganised Browser Bookmarks.

• Doing this in Firefox if you have the delicious add-on –   it thinks you want your browser bookmarks and not a file when you choose to import. Use a different browser for this step.
• Importing from the Organize Bookmarks panel in Firefox – it doesn’t take your folder names into tags from this interface
• Remember to give a unique tag to all your imports, such as “imported” so you can isolate them later if you need to delete and redo the import. Once you’re happy and complete, you can delete this single tag. (It will show up with some prominence in your tag cloud otherwise