/Culture/ Del.icio.us: 15 tasty tweaks
04/07/2006 | Filed under Discover > Culture
Del.icio.us is great, but with some tips, tweaks and plug-ins you can make it even tastier. As Gary Marshall discovers, bookmarks are just the beginning...
In 2003, Joshua Schachter was looking for a way to save and share web pages with his friends. Del.icio.us was the result: an elegant and effective way to store URLs that made it exceptionally easy to find them again. The site soon spread beyond Schachter’s circle of friends, and by late 2005 the site had a quarter of a million members, which was enough to bring Yahoo! a-knocking with bags of cash.
Del.icio.us owes its success to two things: sharing and tagging. Each user’s bookmarks are publicly available, and you’re encouraged to tag them using keywords that help describe what the bookmark actually is. The result is a massive database of bookmarks that you can browse by date, by tag or by author. Such ‘social bookmarking’ creates a shared library of sites with multiple uses. It’s ideal for storing bookmarks for use on multiple computers, for keeping track of stories for a research project, and for finding interesting stuff on the web.
An entire industry has sprung up around del.icio.us, with sites offering tools, viewers, browser plug-ins and tutorials that make an excellent site even more interesting. Over the next few pages we’ll discover 15 top tweaks that make del.icio.us even tastier.
1. Keep on top of your bookmarks with Internet Explorer’s Active Channels
del.icio.us/help/activechannel
The overwhelming majority of del.icio.us tools are for Firefox, but you can also find the odd treasure designed for IE. This tool was put together by the team at del. icio.us and enables you to view your bookmarks by adding them to IE’s Active Channels. All you need to do is log in to your del.icio.us account and download the CDF (Channel Definition Format) file.
2. Make your del.icio.us links visible for all to see in a WordPress blog
linuxbrit.co.uk/blog/2004/10/01/wordpress-delicious-plugin-10
If you’ve got a WordPress-powered blog up and running, you can display your latest del.icio.us links in a sidebar by putting Tom Gilbert’s PHP file in your wp-content/plugins folder. You can also edit the file to change its parameters, and the output can be styled-up via CSS.
3. See who’s linked to a page – and what they’ve said about it
www.kokogiak.com/delicious_linkbacks.html
Add the Linbacks bookmarklet to your Favorites/Bookmarks and you can see who’s linked to the page you’re currently viewing. Simply click on the button and a little pop-up will appear to show you the names of del.icio.us users who have linked to the page, what tags they’ve used and any descriptive text that’s been added.
4. Keep IE up-to-date with Bunnyhug
Bunnyhug Updater downloads your bookmarks and stores them as shortcuts in your Internet Explorer Favorites folder. You’ll need to install the .NET Framework 1.1 in order to run it, and it’s a very good idea to create a new subfolder in Favorites: whenever you run the program it will delete any existing shortcuts you have stored in the folder and replace them with your del.icio.us bookmarks.
5. Load your Firefox bookmarks into del.icio.us
Most del.icio.us tools take your bookmarks and put them in your browser, but del.icio.us Loader does the reverse: it takes your Firefox bookmarks and stuffs them into your del.icio.us account. To use the Loader you need to create a Bookmarks file by choosing Bookmarks - Manage Bookmarks - File - Export from within Firefox, and then it’s just a matter of telling the Loader where to find the file and what tags to use. You can’t tag your bookmarks individually, but you can always edit them from within del.icio.us.
6. Display your del.icio.us bookmarks in any blog or web page
veen.com/jeff/delicious-tutorial.html
Jeffrey Veen has found a clever way to add del.icio.us links to any blog via the Feed Digest RSS tool, which you can use to add almost anything to your web site.
It’s worth remembering that adding such a feed could slow down your page load times: that’s because your site needs to connect to FeedDigest to get the bookmarks before they can be displayed, so if the site is down or running slowly then your site will suffer the knock-on effects. We’re not picking on FeedDigest here: it’s a problem that affects all such site add-ons.
7. Fight déjà vu with Familiar Taste
Can’t remember whether you’ve already added a page to your bookmarks? Familiar Taste is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that checks your account to see if you’ve already tagged the current page. If you have, the script displays a semi-transparent box telling you when you bookmarked the page and what tags you used.
8. Install the official Firefox plug-in
del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension
The official Firefox plug-in gives you buttons to quickly add a bookmark or view your existing ones, and it adds a right-click menu that enables you to bookmark a page with one quick click. You can add notes to a bookmark by highlighting text on the page, and you also get an additional menu that provides keyboard shortcuts for commonly-used features. The plug-in also adds del.icio.us to Firefox’s search box.
9. Search your bookmarks with Apple’s Spotlight
ianhenderson.org/delimport.html
OS X’s Spotlight search is a fantastic thing, and Delimport extends its reach to include your del.icio.us bookmarks. The index is updated every half an hour and the Spotlight search results will show you the URL, title, description and any tags.
10. Add del.icio.us to the Firefox search box
del.icio.us/help/firefox/search
If you’d like to search del.icio.us from Firefox but don’t need the official plug-in’s bells and whistles, this script adds the site to the search box and nothing else.
11. Use the most minimalist Firefox extension
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=527
Patrick Lauke’s extension is more minimalist than the official del.icio.us one. It adds a single button to the toolbar and an entry to the context menu, which enables you to post the current page or link to your account.
12. Hide your bookmarks
sandbox.sourcelabs.com/priv.at
Although the point of del.icio.us is to share bookmarks, that doesn’t mean you can’t hide them if you want to. This site enables you to create bookmarks for others, but they have to be logged in to see them. That means if you create a bookmark for yourself, you can keep it private.
The trick is to use the ‘for’ tag, which you use to specify a username. For example, a bookmark tagged ‘for: netmag’ would only be viewable by the user called ‘netmag’. Alex Bosworth’s bookmark takes this idea and automates it: drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar and when you want to create a private bookmark, click on the button.
This creates a bookmark with the ‘for’ tag set to your username, and you’ll be able to view your private collection at del.icio.us/for/yourusername. It’s important to note, however, that while the system works to a certain degree, your bookmarks won’t be completely private. Hidden bookmarks can still be viewed at del. icio.us/private.bookmarks, however your username won’t be attached to them.
13. Use del.icio.us as an MP3 player
This little bit of JavaScript enables your site visitors to play MP3s directly from your site or blog page without having to download anything. Add the following line of JavaScript to your page and a little Flash play button will appear next to any MP3 links.:
<script type=“text/javascript” src=“http:// del.icio.us/js/playtagger”></script>
The script also works for browsers: if you add it to your bookmarks toolbar, you can use PlayTagger to play music from any page that links to MP3s.
14. What are people really linking to?
Ever wondered what sites are attracting people’s attention? Now you can find out with Populicio.us, which enables you to view the most popular sites in the last 24 hours, two days, seven days or one month. You can also view the most popular sites of all time and the most popular top-level domains that people are bookmarking. Unsurprisingly, dotcom addresses rule the roost.
15. See your bookmarking patterns in the form of pretty pictures
Revealicious is a collection of three interactive Flash applets that interrogate your del.icio.us account and present your bookmarks in some interesting ways. Each applet looks great, and they’re strangely addictive – but they’re not just pretty distractions, they’re also experiments that hope to find new ways of interacting with and managing your bookmarks. The fact that you can spend days staring boggle-eyed at them is just a bonus.
Comments
www.akaneon.com / 08/11/2006 / 10:18 / http://www.akaneon.com
Hey, that's really cool! Thanks a lot! :)
Mathew Browne / 03/07/2007 / 13:18 / http://www.mbwebdesign.co.uk
Of all of these, Revealicious excites me the most. How do these developers think of these things?
Hornet / 17/12/2007 / 10:11 / http://myopiclunacy.com
Your url for playtagger is incorrect. It should be
http://del.icio.us/js/playtagger.js
the ".js" was missing and there was a space before "del"
Daniel Foster / 03/04/2008 / 03:47 / http://www.pcfastlane.com/
Nice article. Del.icio.us is a great site often overlooked by many web users. If only there were something like Bunnyhug for Firefox. I can imagine a good many Del.icio.us users prefer it over IE.
Mike / 22/08/2008 / 19:45 / http://www.amazon.com
I love Del.icio.us. Thanks for the info!
