Public Google Bookmarks Feeds
Posted by ark, ,
I used to use del.icio.us for my bookmarks. There were two things I really liked about it, private bookmarks and public bookmark feeds. There were many things I didn't like about it, it was slow, foxylicious was kinda funky to show my bookmarks in my browser and adding bookmarks was really slow as the browser popped up a whole new window and it was a little too public. Plus I always, always had to pause and think really hard about where to add those damn periods when I was typing in the url. However the public feeds were great, I could subscribe to them in Google Reader and then embed them on my web pages and even do some simple jiggery pokery so they'd look just like regular lists and just like part of my template. That was the "Recent Links" you'd see on the side, go ahead and look, it's back now and that's really the point of this post....

When Google Toolbar started to integrate Google Bookmarks I decided to make the switch. I used Mihai's script to move over all my del.icio.us bookmarks. It was going great, I was easily adding bookmarks by clicking on the star in my toolbar (I really only use toolbar for that now and the very fancy 'UP' button (a feature so trivial it never seems to get mentioned on any google toolbar pages)). However I forgot all about my links feeds for my guests! They were going stale for over a year, eventually I just removed that section from my website but I missed it and wanted it back. Google Bookmarks have rss feeds, but they're protected behind some authentication. I finally worked out how to authenticate to Google Services (without sending my google password over basic auth (sheesh!)), You need to get an SID cookie value and then pass that in with future requests. The GData API provided something that was pretty close to what I wanted, and I finally hacked something together. It runs every hour and gets feeds and html for some queries. I implemented private bookmarks by having a label called _private that I remove from all results.

It also runs as a monitor every day from a crontab to make sure it's still running.

bookmarks.py and .bookmarksrc

Hope you find it useful.

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