Saturday, March 15, 2008

Neat del.icio.us tip

I found a cool new way to use del.icio.us! I've had an account over at del.icio.us for probably a year and while I (somewhat) frequently tag things, I rarely use this service to get to web sites. I'm much more likely to use my google toolbar. However it occurred to me yesterday that 95% of the time, when I open a fresh browser window, there are maybe 5 places I'm likely to be headed. Traditionally, I've had my browser home page set to gmail.com and this choice is pretty arbitrary - although it is one of the 5 places I'm usually headed to when I hit my browser icon.

So here's the tip:
I created a special tag ("favorite" as it were) and tagged each of these special sometimes-homepages with this special tag. Then I set my browser homepage to http://del.icio.us/cgs1019/favorite. Now when I open my browser, I've got my hand-picked set of likely destinations.

If you don't have a del.icio.us account, you should! It's a great way to keep track of all the sites you're interested in without having a Bookmarks menu that goes down to the floor. Also, it's a great way to utilize this awesome tip which I went to so much trouble to share.
So check it out!

4 comments:

Travis Whitton said...

One nice thing about having friends on del.icio.us is how easy it is to share links. I frequently find things online I'd like to show to a friend, and "for tagging" makes it really share. All you have to do is add a tag of for:username where username is the identity of the person you'd like to send the link to. Next time they hit del.icio.us, it'll be waiting in their "links for you".

mksandoz said...

so why not just create a simple HTML file on your machine containing links to those 5 sites?

Unknown said...

many reasons, the most basic of which is that i don't care for quick fixes when a deeper solution is possible.

but mainly, it's because i use at least 2 different machines regularly -- storing the *idea* of the list in the cloud is more reliable, accessible, scalable, etc.
not to mention that if i want to modify the list, it's the difference between editing HTML by hand (ugh) or tagging a site on delicious (what it's made to do)

the right tool for the right job;
don't reinvent the wheel;
never write HTML by hand if you can avoid it.

mr. kanning, i presume?

Anonymous said...

GNU Guy, just reached here from daily vim. Awesome template.