Yep, this is old. Del.icio.us was a link-sharing / personal link storage system that existed wayyyy in the past. Before Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge had profiles and the ability to store your favorite pages and access them from different computers.

Because that was the problem Delicious solved: accessing your favorite links from your work’s computer or at home. Back when that was cool.

Today, reviewing my old accounts and changing passwords I bumped into it, and logged in just to see if it still works. Well, sort of, because logging out was causing internal server errors and various HTTP 500 statuses were the most common page I could load while trying Delicious again.

Exporting my Delicious links

Somehow I managed to click on my profile without the thing crashing on me and surprisingly I could export all my old links and download them in a nice HTML file. All this was done in my iPad running iPadOS 13 Beta 4, so I have access to that file thanks to the download manager Apple finally included in Safari for iOS.

But HTML is not my thing, I’d rather prefer Markdown. So the idea was to convert that HTML into Markdown, using the tools my iPad offers, and I managed to do that just by opening the HTML file with iA Writer, selecting everything (Cmd + A in my Bluetooth keyboard) and pasting it in this HTML to Markdown converter online. Nothing too fancy to do in a different kind of computer, but a completely new workflow in the super-restricted world of iOS.

Now I’m just clicking on links, deleting lots of dead links, or pages that doesn’t interest me anymore. But also rediscovering old favorites that are still useful or fun to use. Will keep all those for reference in the resulting Markdown file, which I’m editing also with iA Writer.

Sometimes, it just feels good to reopen your old files, links, projects… it reminds us the path we’ve walked to reach this very moment. And how everything in the Internet is so ephemeral.