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Digital Culture

Bookmark query for the blogosphere

Here’s the situation: I’ve got a large bookmark file from Netscape Navigator (4.2 megs of bookmarks…yes, you read that correctly). I would love to do a few things:

  • Be able to import it into IE (Explorer seems to just choke on it)
  • Run a link checker on it that could identify the dead links

Those two would get me started. It’s not standard HTML (having just been dumped from Netscape), so that’s a little wierd. I could massage it into psuedo-standard via find/replace, but then IE wouldn’t import it (I don’t think).

Thoughts?

By griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

2 replies on “Bookmark query for the blogosphere”

The Netscape bookmark format is (more or less) standard HTML. They used DL, DT, and DD to define the bookmarks folders as nested lists (I believe Firefox and Mozilla still use this format). There are (or used to be) a lot of programs to do the conversion (eg Bookmark Converter). I don’t know an easy way to check the links (unless the bookmark converter will do this too), but you could parse the bookmarks file (or use regex to find all the links) and then do a link check on the extracted links. Of course, then you have to prune the list by hand.

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