Visualizing your del.icio.us bookmarks DeliciousMind

del.icio.us is a nifty bookmark service – no doubt about that. However, if the way it displays the bookmarks doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can add a whole new dimension to your bookmark collection by turning it into a mindmap using a clever utility called DeliciousMind. This tiny tool converts your del.icio.us bookmarks into a mindmap, which you can then view and edit in the FreeMind application as well as publish on the Web.

First, make sure that Java Runtime Environment and FreeMind are installed on your machine. Download then the deliciousmind.zip archive, and unpack it into your home directory. Next, you have to “extract” bookmarks from your del.icio.us account. To do this, point your browser to http://del.icio.us/api/posts/recent?count=10000, enter your user name and password when prompted, then save the page as bookmarks.xml in the deliciousmind directory (in Firefox, choose File → Save Page As). In the terminal, switch to the deliciousmind directory, and run the following command:

sh deliciousmind.sh bookmarks.xml bookmarks.mm

On Windows, use this command instead:

deliciousmind.cmd bookmarks.xml bookmarks.mm

This converts the xml file into a mindmap, which you can open in FreeMind. Here is what the finished result looks like:

Figure 1: Browse your del.icio.us bookmarks as a mindmap

But that’s not all. Using another nifty tool called Flash Browser for FreeMind, you can publish your bookmark mindmap on the web. Download the freeMindFlashBrowser.zip archive, unzip it, and copy the bookmarks.mm file into the resulting folder. Open the mindmaps.html file in a text editor, and replace the default freeMindFlashBrowser.mm mindmap with bookmarks.mm. To do this, simply search for the “freeMindFlashBrowser.mm” string and replace it with “bookmarks.mm”. That’s all there is to it!

Figure 2: Published bookmark mindmap

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