How do I automate the exporting of Bloglines Keep New blog posts?

December 3, 2006 6:13 PM

How can I automate the exporting of Keep New blog posts from Bloglines to del.icio.us?

Although reading my Bloglines LifeHacker feed is a joy-filled daily ritual. Yet, Gina, Adam, Josh et. al. are the chief contributors to the ballooning number of almost 400 LifeHacker articles in my Bloglines account with the Keep New check box thingy ticked-off.

I am finally convinced I have to use a different method to store Blogline posts for my future reference and review. I would hate to lose LifeHacker goodies or any of my other +/- 1500 Keep New posts because they represent 3 years of meta-aggregation.

As you can imagine, manually exporting a post-per-click with Firefox's del.icio.us add-on is a time-intensive task with a high score on the boring and tedious index.

Perhaps a MeFite King of Kode has already written a script to automate the Bloglines export process while retaining the posts' titles and URLs?

What direction does the hive noggin offer?

posted by choragus to computers & internet (6 comments total)

The right way to do this is for Bloglines to support it, which they might do if you suggest it.

Failing that, it shouldn't be that hard to write a greasemonkey script to override the javascript function called when you click the button.

This script, which adds a "post to del.icio.us link" instead of the "clip this" on each post may provide some insight on how to get started.

I haven't tried it, and I'm way to busy to tackle this, but hope that helps.
posted by Caviar at 7:05 PM on December 3, 2006

That would be freaking awesome. I don't have the time to wrangle with javascript and greasemonkey, but I'd love anyone who did create an easy way. Keep us posted!
posted by chrisamiller at 7:18 PM on December 3, 2006

Maybe you should store less. Seriously. If you get to the point where something you're looking for can be more easily googled than trawling back through saved posts, you're saving too much.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 8:45 AM on December 4, 2006

Maybe what you want to do is use the Clip/Blog This function, which stores them in a separate view on Bloglines, so they aren't visible while you're reading your new stuff. You get your choice of whether to put them on your own personal Bloglines blog (publicly viewable if you want), or your clippings (private, organizable by folders).

Unfortunately, no way to automate that that I know of. But do 5-10 a day, they'll be gone in no time.
posted by timepiece at 8:50 AM on December 4, 2006

I would like to know the answer to this too. I started looking through there developer tools, and saw the Sync API, but they don't feature many things that make use of it.

A semi-interesting feed reader I found in their discussion board was Snarfer. When I did the bloglines synchronize, it marked EVERYTHING as unread, which doesn't help me any. GreatNews seems to have the same, but slightly better, support for these "unread" items.

It appears that both readers problems stem from the sync api itself. (I have no way to back this statement up, this is just a guess)

As for exporting this stuff, Caviar is right on: it should be supported. But I think I'll listen to Mr. Gunn and store less (in Bloglines). If it weren't for finals right now, I would say I'd want to explore integrating with Google Desktop.
posted by coreb at 9:12 PM on December 4, 2006

All,
I dropped a line over to Bloglines pointing back to this posting. I shall status this as information becomes available.

Great Optimism,
posted by choragus at 9:26 PM on December 5, 2006