Bulk convert imported Pinboard bookmarks to Markdown

[jonmoore]

Not sure that anyone’s being a luddite or critical or unhip – just a couple of guys looking to help.

I’m probably feeling a tad touchy having read through though the appalling tone some senior members of this form took (many of which are on the DT staff) towards a poster in this recent thread - New Version

I’m not suggesting he was without fault but I thought his treatment was very harsh.

Seems like you have two needs

Correction, I have one single need - the conversion of 20,000 plus bookmarks imported to my DT database to Markdown. I have no problem converting web page content to markdown on an ad hoc basis. I also keep my nvALT folder in Dropbox and index it with both DT on my laptop and Desktop so I can avoid having to use the DT sync engine.

The first task seems a little less tractable. I’ve been looking around the web and don’t see anyone obvious who has posted that utility. It’s sometimes hard to find code for these one-off one-time needs – if I find something I’ll come back here and note it. I thought Brett Terpstra or Gabe Weatherhead might have done something like this, but no joy looking over there.

Since such a conversion isn’t really limted to being a DEVONthink problem, per se, maybe if you also checked in at Ask Different, or Reddit, or browsed repos on GitHub you’d find someone who wanted the same solution and built it for themself.

I’ve discussed the problem directly with Brett Terpestra (I’m part of the Marked Beta team) and we both felt the the task was best resolved from within Devonthink. Brett suggests that it will be a simple enough task to achieve for somebody with appropriate Applescript skills via the heckyesmarkdown.com/ API.

The core of my suggestion is that seeing as Markdown documents are a standard part of the DT spec, DT should be providing a conversion tool in much the same way as they do for other document formats that are part of the DT spec - WebArchive, HTML, Rich Text, PDF etc.

I did of course search far and wide for an alternative solution and came across this Python based solution - larryhynes.net/2015/03/local-ful … earch.html - which I will trial and report back on the results. However I still believe the DT should provide a native solution seeing as they already facilitate the import of the bookmarks from Pinboard via an Applescript in the first place.