delicious synchronization of bookmarks
If you have multiple computers1 and
have ever wished that you could synchronize your web bookmarks
across them, here is a relatively painless, cross-platform way of
doing so.
Prerequisites
You will the following tools:
- the free web browser, Mozilla Firefox
- a free account with the del.icio.us service
- the free Firefox del.icio.us extension
Mozilla Firefox can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org.
If you are not familiar with del.icio.us, in short, it is a
service that allows you to "post" bookmarked pages to a central
server. The maintainers tout the fact that it is a "social
bookmarks manager" because you can see links that other users
have collected, but for our purposes, we can think of it as a
magical place on the internet that will hold your bookmarks, and
can be accessed from anywhere you can run a web browser. The url
for the site is: http://del.icio.us,
and signing up for a free account there is a prerequisite for the
technique I am about to describe.
The Firefox delicious extension can be downloaded from http://delicious.mozdev.org.
This document assumes you know how to install Firefox extensions.
After all of the above prerequisites have been met, the fun
begins.
The Technique
The first step is to visit a web page that you wish to
bookmark. In this example, we're going to use boingboing.net (henceforth
simply referred to as "boingboing").
Once you are viewing the web page, the next step is to
context-click (typically the right-mouse button) in the web page
and select the "delicious" item. The action we are interested in
is the first one, "Post current page".
A dialog window will pop up, and you will be asked to enter some
data. The only data we care about for this example is the "Tags"
entry box. In this box, you need to enter at least one keyword
that characterizes the page for you. You can enter more keywords
if you like, but you'll need at least one.
-- a brief note on tags --
Take this opportunity to think ahead a bit, and decide if you
want to categorize your bookmarks into different categories. If
so, you'll want to choose a unique tag that will be shared by all
your bookmarks in that category. Above, you can see that I have
several categories of bookmarks2,
such as "hourly", "daily", "weekly", and "tmp". Since boingboing
gets updated several times a day, I will place it into my
"hourly" category. Notice that I use "hourly" as one of my tags
to describe the boingboing web page.
The reason we're using Firefox as our browser is because it has
built-in support for RSS feeds, (called "live bookmarks" in
Firefox). When you subscribe to an RSS feed (live bookmark),
every time the feed is updated, you'll see the changes
automatically.
Here are my "hourly" bookmarks before adding boingboing.
After the steps above, you can see that our new boingboing
bookmark has appeared. Giggedy giggedy!
Subscribing to RSS feeds
This is great, but how do you get the live bookmarks to appear in
Firefox? We need to go to our del.icio.us page, and subscribe to
the RSS feed. Remember above when I mentioned that you would want to
group related bookmarks together by using a common tag? Now is
where we reap the benefits.
Go to your del.icio.us page that contains your tag. In this
example, I have already tagged a few pages with "fort_collins",
but have not yet subscribed to the feed. Near the lower right
hand corner is an orange icon. Click on it and select the first
item.
This will let you subscribe to your RSS feed for your keyword. I
prefer for the feed to show up in my Bookmarks Toolbar, so I
select it when given the choice.
Notice how I now have a new group of bookmarks related to Fort
Collins. The best part is, if I encounter a new page related to
Fort Collins, I will simply add it to del.icio.us using the
technique above, and the bookmark will automatically appear in my
"ftc" group, much like the boingboing example.
One of the most useful ways to use this technique is when you
encounter web pages on one computer that you would like to read
at a later time on another computer. For instance, if you are at
work and come across something interesting, but won't have time
to read it until you get home3.
From work, post it to del.icio.us with the "tmp" tag. Once at
home, as long as your browser is subscribed to your "tmp"
del.icio.us RSS feed, the link you bookmarked at work will
automatically show up. Nice!
Limitations
If the del.icio.us web site stops working, as it occasionally
does, you will not be able to view your bookmarks.
It takes about half an hour from the time that you post a
bookmark to del.icio.us before it shows up in Firefox.
