Recently, the Enhanced Bookmarks gadget has been un-usable due to un-expected changes made by Google to its Gadget API. This has rendered Enhanced Bookmarks useless and users are unable to retrieve the bookmarks they had stored.
There are two possible ways to retrieve your bookmarks. For some, both methods may work while sometimes only one of the methods will work. The steps below outlines one possible method for you to retrieve these bookmarks. A simpler method has also been created, which can be found below. Let others know through comments on this post if either helped you obtain your bookmarks.
- Navigate to iGoogle
Note: You need to use Google’s base domain, http://www.google.com/ig. Canvas view is not avaliable in some localizations (Thanks Anon from Google Gadget comments).
- Open the Enhanced Bookmarks gadget to ‘Canvas View’ by using either of the canvas buttons, noted in the picture below.
- The gadget should open in canvas view however not render, and instead display an error message like the one below.
Right click this frame (Chrome, Mozilla) and Open in new tab or equivalent.
When opened in a new tab, the error mesage should remain, however, grab the URL. It should look similar to the format of
http://43.ig.gmodules.com/gadgets/ifr?view=home&url=http://gadgets.joshuakent.com/bookmarks/bookmarks.xml
&nocache=1〈=en&country=us&.lang=en&.country=us&synd=ig&mid=43
&ifpctok=195224545284223600&exp_split_js=1&parent=http://www.google.com
&refresh=3600&extern_js=/extern_js/f/CgJ4ACwrMBI4ACwrMBM4ACw/2f02v-4a_uU.js&up_title=Enhanced%20Bookmarks&up_bgcolor=%23e5ecf9
&up_bookmarks=<your bookmarks in JSON here>&up_clean_up=false
(A long url I know, its the reason the gadget is breaking for some people.)
- This URL contains your bookmarks in JSON format where I have indicated above. You can intially try use something like JSONviewer from http://www.codeplex.com/JsonViewer (Thanks Joe90!) to view and format this data however, some users have noted that not all JSON strings will work (due to browser encoding). To overcome this, put the text into Notepad, or a similar text editor, and find and replace (CTRL+H) the following sets of values:
- %22 with ”
- %20 with a single space
- %2F with /
- %5B with [
- %5D with ]
- %3A with :
- %3F with +
- %3D with =
- %2C with ,
- %7B with {
- %7D with }
- After replacing the characters you can put the text back into JSON Viewer then press ‘Format’ in the toolbar – this will turn it into a more readble form.
- Hopefully then you should have a readable, backup copy of your bookmarks, should the gadget not be restored to a working condition. Post a comment to this post should this method work or not work for you.
The following is a method from Wolfgang. As noted above, it may work for some people who were not able to retrieve their bookmarks using the steps above.
- Go to your iGoogle page with your (empty) enhanced bookmark section
- Right click and click ‘View Page Source’
- Select all source code in the new window (CTRL A), copy everything (CTRL C)
- Put the cursor in the recovery textfield below, and paste everything (CTRL V).
- Press Submit and hopefully you see your bookmarks.
Recovery Textfield:
