Importing Furl pages into iterasi

Earlier this month it was announced that Furl, an early innovator in the world of social bookmarking, had been purchased by Diigo. The announcements we read said that the Furl service would be rolling into Diigo in a future release.

Since that announcement we have had quite a few Furl users ask us if they could import their Furl pages into iterasi. The answer is ‘Yes, sort of’. Let me explain. At this time we have an import tool that would let you import your bookmarks and their associated metadata and use iterasi to make fresh archives of those Webpages. To be clear, we do not (yet) offer the ability to import the pages as they were captured by Furl users days, months or years ago.

We have talked about the effort to import Furl pages and it would not be hard for us to develop. Currently our plate is pretty full so the decision to add this capability will be based on how many people ask for it. So let us know if this is something you would like. If we get enough requests and decide to add this feature I’ll make an announcement here at a later date.

In the meantime, if you want to import the Furl URLs into iterasi and get a fresh archive of the webpage, then do the following:

EXPORT your Furl items as bookmarks:

1) Login to your Furl account

2) Go to ‘Tools->Export My Archive’

3) Click on the ‘Browser Bookmark’ link to select the export format used by IE and Firefox.

4) Save the file locally somewhere that you can remember

5) If you want to import your Furl ‘Categories’ as iterasi ‘Tags’, then you will need to modify the export file to change the label “CATEGORIES” to “TAGS” and replace the semicolons used to separate the tags with commas. The easiest way to do this is to open up the file in notepad, and do a global replace for CATEGORIES and semicolons. Choose ‘Edit->Replace’ and replace ‘CATEGORIES’ with ‘TAGS’. Repeat the previous step replacing semicolons with commas. (NOTE: Use ‘Replace All’ to replace all occurrences in the document at once, saving you from having to go through the file one bookmark at a time)

IMPORT your Furl bookmarks into iterasi

1) Login to iterasi

2) Go to ‘Tools’ and click on the ‘Import’ button

3) In the import form, click on the ‘Browse’ button and locate your saved exported Furl file.

4) If you want to add extra tags to your Furl item – perhaps you want to tag all of these with the Tag ‘ImportedFromFurl’ you can do that by adding to the Tags box.

5) If you want your Furl items to be private, check the Private checkbox.

6) Click on the ‘OK’ button when you are ready to import

7) Our servers will browse to each of your imported Furl URL’s and archive a fresh copy of that URL’s webpage and save it in your account. You can see the progress of this in your ‘Pending Archives”

Again, let us know if the full webpage import from Furl into iterasi is something important to you. We will count the votes and if there is enough interests we’ll post here at a later date.