Changing my name on del.icio.us

September 27, 2007 10:31 AM

How can I create a new user account on del.icio.us, starting with all my current links and tags?

I want to keep an openly shared account, but I would like to disengage from certain people who have been tracking and commenting on my links and tags.

I've seen some (less than helpful*) discussion of importing and exporting, but its seems that the importing part requires "getting under the hood"* to some extent. Anyone know a simple way to do this?

less than helpful: http://ask.metafilter.com/13728/#237018
under the hood: http://overstated.net/projects/del.icio.us/delicious_import.pl

posted by StickyCarpet to computers & internet (7 comments total)

del.icio.us has built-in import/export features under the 'settings' section. Export your links, save to a file, start your new account, and import the saved file.
posted by logic vs love at 10:38 AM on September 27, 2007

If it's really that simple, did I just waste a question? Thanks logic vs love. Why does google give such discouraging results? Was this recently added/fixed?
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:43 AM on September 27, 2007

What l.v.l said, though I think you may need to tinker with the 'shared/not-shared' settings after you import. I did this recently and the default setting on all of them afterwards was 'not-shared', which was a bummer.
posted by jquinby at 10:43 AM on September 27, 2007

Hmm. I'm going to unmark this in hopes someone can help further. The issue seems to be that not only does it not export the settings, but the notes as well are lost, and that represents the bulk of the effort.
posted by StickyCarpet at 12:20 PM on September 27, 2007

Try using pydelicious or similar to write a script to export and re-import your data.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 12:37 PM on September 27, 2007

One option I've considered:
Subscuribe to your old user name in the network so you have all the recent public posts, make your network private, and use import/export to get basic links.

Other than that, I think it's the scripting options described above.
posted by ejaned8 at 12:49 PM on September 27, 2007

Yes, you can export and import your bookmarks in your settings - here's the FAQ about that. We added the import feature in March 2006, which is why some older tutorials don't mention it. Exporting should include all your notes (check the source of the HTML file), but it does lose your shared/not-shared settings because imported bookmarks are private by default. We're working on a bulk edit feature that will allow you to share a bunch of imported bookmarks at once, though.

(Exporting also doesn't preserve your bundles or tag descriptions...the export format is pretty limited because it's a standard browser bookmarks format, but we have a better export feature on our big todo list.)
posted by dreamyshade at 12:54 PM on September 27, 2007