delicious

From the Delcious website:

What is Delicious?

Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.

Delicious is the bookmarking tool I’ve been seeking for years now. (It’s been around for years too but I tend to be a late adopter to social networking services.) I regularly access the internet from my computer at home or from one of two different computers at work. I’ve been in search of a way to effectively synchronize my bookmarks between all three of those machines.

A typical situation for me is this: late afternoon, all my work is done but the receptionist left early so I need to man the phones. Between calls I tend to surf the net a bit. I get off at 5pm and typically about 4:50pm I’ll come across an awesome site that I want to continue exploring when I get home. Recently I’ve been using StumbleUpon to help me find those pages again when I get home but often enough they aren’t really the right type of site to be sharing on StumbleUpon.

That’s where Delicious kicks in. Delicious is perfect for bookmarking any type of site that you’d typically bookmark in your browser, including items that you don’t want to share in the social bookmarking environment via private bookmarks.

I’ve found that to use any sort of social bookmarking or social networking site effectively, you need the Firefox add-on to go with it so I downloaded the Delicious add-on. This adds several items to your Firefox window: a menu, a toolbar, a few buttons in your navigation bar, and a sidebar.

I turned off the toolbar since it took up too much screen real estate and I also turned off my standard Firefox bookmarks toolbar since I’ll be using Delicious to access my bookmarks from now on. (View > Toolbars to turn them on and off.)

The navigation bar icons serve the following functions from left to right:

• access your Delicious homepage
• open and shut the sidebar
• add new items to your bookmarks or update your notes or tags on existing bookmarks

The sidebar is the other essential feature you need to be using.

At the top of the sidebar you see a search box. That search box lets you search your bookmarks by title or by any tags you’ve added to it.

Below the search box you have a section of tags. Tags are like the folders you would have organized your bookmarks in if you were still using browser based bookmarking but have the advantage that you can add multiple tags per item (similar to labels in Gmail if you’re familiar with those). The more tags you add the better but you don’t need to have everything tagged right away to be able to take advantage of Delicious. Just tag as you go.

The bottom section of the sidebar is your bookmarks. I have mine sorted by Most Visited so that it’s easy to pop over to my favorite sites. If you choose a tag from the section above, only the bookmarks that have that tag will show in this bottom section. If you type something in the search box (even a few letters) it will narrow your list of bookmarks down to only the items that fit that search.

The contents of your sidebar will update even as you make changes to it from different computers although so far it appears to me that your Most Visited items are not cumulative between machines.

It’s easy to get started on Delicious because you can import all of your existing browser based bookmarks and it will tag them based on the names of all the folders those items are nested in. Everything you import this way starts out as a private bookmark but you can change items to public as you like.

I’m loving Delicious so far, I’ve barely started using it and already I can’t imagine how I lived without it.

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