Live bookmarks and del.icio.us
While I’ve used Firefox for some time and heard about the recent addition of Live Bookmarking, I’ve never had a need to try them out. I had previously started using Bloglines to keep track of my regular haunts and I didn’t know what else I could do with live bookmarks.
This all changed when I finally signed up for a del.icio.us account. If its new to you, del.icio.us is a tool for managing your bookmarks online. If you don’t have an account, go register. Trust me on this, once I signed up, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t done it sooner. I’ve always had a need to revisit sites that I dig up at work when I’m at home and vice versa but the best method I had to manage this was sending myself emails back and forth. I’ve tried to use several different online bookmark tools including the Yahoo Bookmarks that are part of MyYahoo. All that I tried were clunky and more trouble to use than they were worth.
Enter del.icio.us. The first great thing that you’ll want to get when you signup for you account is your bookmarklet for creating new bookmarks. You can find this on the “About” page. The bookmarklet is essentially a favorite that you’ll add to your browser. Anytime you’re viewing a page that you want to bookmark, you select your bookmarklet from your favorites and you’ll be sent off to del.icio.us, add your bookmark and then be returned back to the original page you were viewing. Thats it. Easy. You’re done.
But now comes the good part. You’ll access your personal account at del.icio.us/youraccountname. This page not only displays all your bookmarks but also publishes an RSS feed. You’ll notice a little orange icon appear in the bottom right corner of your Firefox status bar which indicates that the page you’re viewing has a feed available. Simply click this icon and select Subscribe to RSS. You’ve now added a live bookmark.
Now go to your bookmarks menu in Firefox and you’ll see a new entry for your del.icio.us account. As you mouse over the live bookmark you’ll get a submenu containing all of your del.icio.us bookmarks! Just follow the same setup at home, work and anywhere else and you’ll have easy access to your online bookmarks right in Firefox.
While this might not be news to some, this to me is the best thing since sliced bread. The only thing that could make this better is if Firefox would break down my del.icio.us bookmarks into subdirectories based on the tags I had assigned them. Overall this is a pretty impressive example 2 quality tools working together. Now go try that in Internet Exploder!
Comments
21. January 2005
You can get an RSS feed for each tag. If you click on the tag in del.icio.us, the RSS feed will be displayed at the bottom, like so: http://del.icio.us/rss/wilshireone/firefox
As you can see it’s pretty easy to guess what the name of the RSS feed will be. You’ll have to sign up for each tag, but no pain, no gain.
23. January 2005
OK—this is cool, but I think I’m missing something. My delicious account currently has 61 links, but when I subscribe to the RSS feed the resulting bookmark does NOT show all 61 links. Does Firefox limit the number of links displayed?
24. January 2005
No, that’s how RSS works. You only ever have the x (usually in 3..10) most recent entries in a feed. Thus the two mentioned extensions don’t use the feeds, but the “del.icio.us API” to access the data.
Thomas Stache
24. January 2005
Foxylicious was exactly what I had in mind! Thanks Thomas. I now use my RSS feed as an easy way to get to the most recents bookmarks I’ve added and Foxylicious see them all grouped by tag.
25. January 2005
After further review, I wouldn’t touch Foxylicious with a 10 foot pole. It crashed my computer at home and wiped out all my bookmarks at work. And no, I didn’t overwrite them myself as the Foxylicious developers warn against. I just opened my browser up this morning as usual and all of my bookmarks were gone, including my Foxlicious bookmarks.
26. January 2005
Sorry to hear that, but I used Foxylicious at 0.2 stage for a while, and it surely didn’t act up like this. Haven’t tried 0.3 though…
Right now I only have the del.icio.us sidebar. I like it’s “post to delicious” dialog, which can be called by a shortcut.
Thomas Stache
1. February 2005
Here’s another trick. Create a bookmark in Firefox with this URL, http://del.icio.us/search/?search=%s and make a keyword, something like “del”.
Then, just type something like “del textpattern” into the address bar. It’ll perform a search on all your bookmarks for anything that has to do with Textpattern. (via)
3. February 2005
You can also use the Bookmarks Synchronizer extension for Firefox. It will upload your bookmarks to an ftp-server of your choice and syncronize them with those on the computer you are working on.
So just install the extension in all the Firefoxes you are using and you will be able to have the same bookmarks available everywhere.
You can also easely make the bookmarks visible as a normal webpage using the description given here. That is also nice because it means you can get to your bookmarks from any browser.
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