del.icio.us evangelising

[trixtah]

So, yeah, I subscribed to del.icio.us late last year, used it once or twice and decided blergh, this isn't working for me. I couldn't face the thought of adding all my bookmarks one by one, either. So, I used Spurl, which is actually a reasonably decent online bookmark manager, and has a nice feature of taking wee thumbnails of the pages you're bookmarking. But it's fairly slow to load, and there aren't many in the way of tools for browser integration. I've been using mybookmarks.com for about 4-5 years, but its interface getting decidedly tired. Frames, for chrissakes (although importing and exporting is pretty easy).

I think it's the fact that I've been really getting into Gmail and its tagging functionality that made me want to give del.icio.us another go (and, Microsoft, when are you going to get something groovy like that into Outlook or OWA? Luckily someone developed Lookout to save your email-searching bacon). So, tags, much better than smelly old folders, since I can never remember what folder I've put something in (especially when it's the "Stuff" or "Thingies" folders).

Del.icio.us, if you haven't managed to encounter it yet, allows you to arrange all your bookmarks by tagging them. The tags are whatever you choose, although due to the "social" nature of the app, if someone's bookmarked the same link before, you'll get their tags popping up as suggestions when you come to tag yourself. And, about the social nature of it, your bookmarks are visible to everyone else, if they know the URL you use. Th tags you create are also public, so if someone clicks on "sex", for example, they can quite possibly see the link to your local sextoy shop that you bookmarked two hours ago. Personally, I'm hoping that one of the features to be developed will allow a "privacy" setting... perhaps a hidden URL that can be given out to interested bods on request (only yourself by default). So, all my private stuff (yes, ok, my porn stash) is staying on Spurl for now, thank you very much!

So, yes, the tags. You can use as many as you like, and mix and match them to fit your more-or-less chaotic thought patterns (maybe you can arrange everything according to a single-layer taxonomy, but I most certainly can't). So, having tags for sex/toys/gadgets/fun/silicone to describe this is entirely feasible. You can either click on individual tags to locate links, or combine tags to find a link with both properties, or just do a good old-fashioned search (which hasn't great functionality, but it mainly works).

Tagging wasn't quite enough to redeem it for me, however. Otherwise I would have been using it much more seriously before now.

• One major development was a script to upload from a bookmarks.html file, which you can export from pretty much any browser (including IE, before you grizzle. I didn't bother exporting, I just pointed the script to my existing Firefox bookmarks). The author tries to sneak in a couple of promotional links with the upload, but it's easy enough to ditch them. You can tag your links before the upload, and it then takes about 1 sec per link to get them there.
• Another great thing is a nice skin which makes the whole thing look MUCH better, to me anyway. It requires the Firefox (or Opera, I believe) browser and the Greasemonkey DHTML scripting extension. I thoroughly recommend Greasemonkey, too. There's some great little widgets you can install (such as getting rid of ads from the Guardian Online).
• Another cool extension is direc.tor (gah! to these random full stops!), which is a pretty damn nifty way of sorting through your tags in a nice view.
  
  This is yet another groovy example of the AJAX (stupid name) model for data interchange, asynchronous retrieval and display, using XMLHTTPRequest and other technlogies like Perl, Python, PHP, XHTML, javascript, whathaveyou, and which is currently implemented by Flickr, Google and various other odds n sods.
  The only problem with it is that you need to click another button to launch the interface. There's no way of setting it as a default view - hopefully del.icio.us will integrate it as an option at some point.
• And there are some good user how-tos being created at the moment. I did a big "Duh!" to one of the suggestions that this chappie made, which is how to add a search of your del.icio.us links to the Firefox quicksearch functionality (whereby you type in a search indicator, such as "del" and a search string and
  
  
  You can use a similar script snippet to just search your tags. I mean, something I should have thought of myself, so I promptly implemented it!!
• Then there is the killer app, as far as I'm concerned, which is dynamically integrating your del.icio.us links into the Firefox browser.
  
  ...AND update themselves on either a daily basis, or you can do it manually. Obviously, you get as many folders as you have tags, so it's not quite as sleek as doing manual folder construction. But associated tags are nested, so you won't have to drill down too far to get to where you should be. You just need to install the Foxylicious extension and
  
  They suggest you DON'T use your root bookmarks folder, because everything there will be expunged (and I like my feeds and toolbar folder, thank you)
  There is another method where you can use the "Live Bookmarks" functionality in Firefox to create dynamic links as well (as our chappie above describes), but that seems not-so-useful to me (tag proliferation), and doesn't get around the problem of "what happens if del.icio.us is down?"
• Finally, here is a goody bag of all the del.icio.us tools you could possibly need.
• I'm not even going to mention all the normal stuff like the built-in RSS and the direct URLs to your tags and tag combinations, et al...

So, there you go. It's always the converted who are the keenest about anything. I'm glad I had another play with it. Since del.icio.us is supposedly "pre-pre-alpha", I'm looking forward to see what other groovy stuff they come up with.