Admin: An XML-Related Question

Update: Problem solved. See below.

Here's a question for any XML jockeys who might be following my blog...

For my blogging and -- now that my kids are starting to sleep more reliably -- other writing projects, I have been intermittently working on a sort of home-grown personal knowledge base. Towards that end, I have realized that a smooth way to import bookmarked and annotated URLs into markdown documents would make my work much more mobile (e.g., platform-agnostic) and faster. (Just dumping the HTML code for the bookmarks into the markdown document, although it would work for some purposes, is worse than useless for others.)

My bookmarking service gets me about half-way to where I need to be: I can export my bookmarks into an xml file. From there, it is a snap to filter for what I want, but I have hit a wall on the problem of switching formats.

Basically, I want to extract a few fields -- the URL, its title, and my notes -- from each entry and make them look like this: [title](URL) -- notes. Using a solution I found to what I take to be a very similar problem, I seem to have hit a wall. I get the formatting marks for the correct number of records, but no data! I know next to nothing about XML, so I could well be barking up the wrong tree, but I don't think so. I suspect that I am missing some aspect of how data is referenced that another pair of eyes might spot right away.

I will have to provide more data by email: Blogger completely butchers regular HTML, let alone anything involving displaying HTML-like markup. If you think you might be able to help, email me and I'll send you more details.

Thanks in advance to anyone offering to help, and to my other readers for their patience.

-- CAV

Updates

10-17-14: My thanks go to reader Jeff Borlik who wrote in a very short time after I posted this and, after a couple of brief email exchanges, had me off and running.