Erik's Weblog: bookmarks2opml.pl

I love it! Years ago (back in 94 or 95) I developed and maintained a fairly popular utility for OS/2 called Ini2URLs. Before Netscape Navigator was available for OS/2, the only decent browser was called IBM WebExplorer. It was a great browser, for its time.

Its bookmark facility was called the QuickList, and it stored the list of URLs in a file called EXPLORE.INI.

When WebExplorer 1.1 came out, it introduced the "URL Objects" which people on Windows and Macintosh now know as URL Shortcuts (aliases). Unfortunately, WebExplorer still stored its QuickList in the INI file and didn't have a way to synchronize with the URL Objects on your desktop.

Ini2URLs exported (and later synchronized) your EXPLORE.INI into URL Objects. v2 of Ini2URLs included URLs2Ini which did the reverse process.

I think it's really cool that we're back where we started, and now someone has written bookmarks2opml, which does the same thing, but between IE's Favourites and Radio UserLand's outline format (OPML).

Why didn't I think of that? ;-)

PS: Ini2URLs was written in REXX. Version 3 also included a SOM utility object C++ DLL which the REXX scripts used to make the experience a little more user friendly. I'll attach version 3 to this message.... I found it from a web site by searching for Ini2URLs on Google.