Idea: Bookmark Plugin for WordPress

I just saved yet another link in my Delicious account, and suddenly thought — “man, it would really suck if Delicious one day disappeared and I lost all of this”.

Indeed.

According to my stats, I have 1,164 bookmarks, mostly with descriptions and manually crafted (to some extent) titles, 1,813 different tags in use, with some being used 187 times. That’s a lot of rich, valuable data that I’ve collectively invested a lot of time in. I want control over it. I want insurance.

The basic idea here is that WordPress has a built in system for storing bookmarks (Links), so why not use it? I like Delicious, and I like the plugins and whatnot that pull its content into my browser, but not necessarily enough to give them all my data and not retain any control over it. So how about this:

  • Add a new taxonomy, let’s call it link_tags,
  • Add an entry box to the Add New Link page, allowing you to enter tags when you create a new Link (don’t forget to use some sexy AJAX suggestions for previously used tags to help control your vocabulary)
  • Select a specific Category for all your links, let’s say “Bookmarks”
  • Build a simple page that looks something like this screenshot of the Delicious one, and include a bookmarklet so that you can open it in a new window and post to your new link-system just as easily as using Delicious.
  • When you use that UI, have it automatically select your Bookmarks category (behind the scenes) and also cross-post into your Delicious account, which you’ve pre-authorized somewhere else.

Voilà, you now have all your links stored in your WordPress installation, so you control the data, and you also have them stored in Delicious, so you can make use of the cool things like the Firefox plugin, which pulls those links directly into your browser.

For bonus points, it would be absolutely awesome to also include an Importer (Tools > Import > Delicious Links) that would suck all your existing Delicious links into this new system, so that you weren’t starting from scratch.

Any taker? 🙂

    • beaulebens said:

      So you're just posting links as the content of actual Posts though, correct? I feel like using the Links system within WP gives more semantic meaning to the links, and gives you the ability to access the pieces of information more programatically. Gonna make this happen… I already have a basic parser for the export file from Delicious…

  2. Beau Lebens said:

    So you're just posting links as the content of actual Posts though, correct? I feel like using the Links system within WP gives more semantic meaning to the links, and gives you the ability to access the pieces of information more programatically. Gonna make this happen… I already have a basic parser for the export file from Delicious…

  4. tylerabell said:

    This would be a great plugin for wordpress, and you could make some integration with Delicious…

  5. Mo Jangda said:

    This would be amazing. I think key to making this really useful would be a Press-This style bookmarklet for adding links. Also awesome (but less important): screenshots of links and template tags to make your bookmarks front-end accessible.

    If I get bored over the next couple of weeks, I may take a crack at this 😛

  6. Justin Shreve said:

    This would be a really cool plugin and would be fun to make.

    If you haven't started I may take a try on it after I wrap up my Search API stuff in the next week.

    • Beau Lebens said:

      I haven't started on it yet Justin, other than to write a quick parser
      for the output/export file (it's Netscape Bookmark HTML format) that
      you can get out of delicious. It'd be a start for the process of
      importing all your current bookmarks, then from there we'd need
      something to post into WP's Links DB, and also across to delicious,
      using their API (http://delicious.com/help/api). LMK if you'd like a
      copy of what I've got (not much) and/or when you start.

  8. Chris said:

    Thanks, found your site for something when i came across this and will check it out bc i also have a ton of delicous bookmarks, so how did that plugin work for you?

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