blog.critical

Using del.icio.us and Firefox

I first stumbled upon del.icio.us because of the very clever URI, it was probably not the first, and probably won’t be the last to do it. Hell, if I lived in Albania I would buy myself http://cri.tic.al

Then I learn that del.icio.us is in fact a social bookmarking tool, or from the site itself “del.icio.us is a collection of favourites - yours and everyone else’s.” It sounded interesting, so I signed up and gave it a go. This article describes how I used del.icio.us and got it working for me, and working with my browser of choice - Firefox. Where Firefox comes into its own is the extensions, which allows you to integrate del.icio.us into the browser.

So, your first port of call for setting this all up would be to download the latest version of Firefox after that head over to del.icio.us and grab yourself a user account. After signing up for del.icio.us you will be told how to add 2 bookmarklets (little bits of JavaScript which perform various actions) I had problems setting up the bookmarklets, so instead opted for this extension (del.icio.us 1.0.2). It adds 2 buttons to Firefox one to tag a page and another to view all your bookmarks as well as a toolbar at the top of Firefox.

You will now be ready to rock with del.icio.us so head over to one of your favourite sites and hit the “Tag” button, watch as a little pop up appears and you can add a description to the site and give it some tags. Drool at the pretty AJAX effects as you click and add tags and how the tags input box has auto complete selections. After you have added a couple of sites head over to your del.icio.us homepage, you can view mine here.

This is where I was a bit disappointed. The first thing which really jumped at me was the method for displaying how many other people have added the link to del.icio.us sure it’s a good idea in theory but when 8000 people have added the same link, well - try reading this - difficult eh? Another thing which I didn’t fancy was going to a web page to get at my bookmarks. I much prefer using the bookmarks menu in Firefox.

Luckily I managed to track down this extension (Foxylicious 0.5) which allows you to synchronise your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox bookmarks. Each page is added into a folder of its tags. E.g. if you add blog.critical to your del.icio.us account with Blogs as the tag, then when you sync Foxylicious it will create a folder with blog.critical inside. One word of caution syncing using Foxylicious will cause any non del.icio.us bookmarks (in the folder you have chosen to synch to) to be deleted. You have been warned!

Using del.icio.us this way means constant control over your bookmarks which is especially useful if you want to have the same bookmarks in 2 places (like I have bookmarks at home and at work) It means I can bookmark sites at work, then come home, synch with del.icio.us and view all my bookmarks, excellent stuff!

If you have enjoyed this article I recommend The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users. Check back soon as I am planning to write a follow up article once I have found some other great things about del.icio.us!

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