del.icio.us How-To
del.icio.us, the online bookmarking service, is a wonderful tool if you give it a chance. The name is obviously a clever play on the typical web address with a "www" prefix and ".com, .org, or .us" domain, but more importantly it is a clever site that eliminates the need to keep, maintain, organize, and migrate bookmark data in your browser and across multiple computers. (Which used to be one of my major pet-peeves about bookmarks.)
As you have probably already noticed, we have added del.icio.us links to the right hand side of Caveserv today. Currently these links are served based on my personal list, although in the future we may include random user bookmark listings if I ever have anyone reading this site and using it on a frequent basis. Beyond the nifty integration into websites, one of my favorite features about del.icio.us that I have been utilizing for some time now is a Mozilla Firefox plugin called del.icio.us Bookmarks which is provided for free by Yahoo! on the Mozilla add-on extensions website. (There is also an IE plugin which appears to work the same as the Firefox extension, but since I don't use IE you can learn to install and configure the IE plugin if you wish.) It is easiest to create a del.icio.us account before installing this add-on, but once you have done so there are a couple of tricks you can do to eliminate the need to keep your bookmarks in your browser.
- Import your bookmarks to del.icio.us - This nifty feature allows you to quickly get all of your bookmarks out of your current browser and on to the web.
- Concerned about the privacy of some of your bookmarks? You can easily enable a simple privacy setting for your del.icio.us bookmarks so that only those bookmarks that you wish to share are publicly viewable. This is a nice setting to protect online snoops from finding out which bank website you frequent, which investment websites you visit, or medical related sites that you visit frequently. This way, the entire world doesn't know all of your online business.
- Tag your sites for easy sorting - I have a lot of tags because I have a lot of bookmarks. I used to have a lot of bookmarks filed into various folders in my browser. That works OK, but sometimes I have a link to a "business" related website that also is sort of a "reference" site about "finances." With a browser, I was forced to pick a specific folder to store that link in, or make multiple links in multiple folders, and that can quickly become cumbersome when a website changes or moves to a new address and you have to redo all of your bookmarks. With tagging, you simply tag your sites as needed, and then you can click on a tag to view all the sites that are related to that tag, even if they have other tags for other categories associated with them!
- Do away with browser bookmarks! - When the Firefox plugin is installed, it adds a new main menu item which allows you to customize many aspects about how you view your del.icio.us bookmarks. You can even add a new toolbar in place of the standard Bookmarks toolbar which lists all of the sites for a particular tag. For instance, I created a tag, "frequent", which I then assigned to those sites which I typically visit every day. Then, I setup my new del.icio.us toolbar to display only the sites with the "frequent" tag. Voilá! A quicklinks toolbar that will now remained synchronized with any computer that I have with a del.icio.us toolbar plugin, regardless of the Operating System being used. How cool is that?!
There are many other ways to use del.icio.us such as sharing links with friends or using the main site to surf for interesting sites that other people are tagging. I'll leave it to you to explore this great service, and hopefully one day we'll have even more of the OS and software independence from that which is most important to each of us: our data.