Do You Bookmark Stuff?

Rolling along with “things my friends ask me about because they think I am their personal Geek Squad,” we have Delicious.

(Thanks, Suzanne, for being the first person to tell me how awesome Delicious is.)

Delicious is a fantastic way to keep all of your bookmarks in one place, organized and on-line.

So, when your computer crashes, as Liv‘s recently did, you don’t lose the years and years of bookmark-collecting you’ve been doing. (You really should be backing up your computer, but that’s another post.)

What’s the fuss?

Delicious collects your bookmarks for you.  It organizes them.  It makes them available to you from anywhere you can get online.  And it has a lovely new interface.

Tagging

Delicious lets you “tag” your bookmarks.  It’s sort of like folders, but better.

Each of the items you save can have one or multiple tags.  So, if you just can’t decide if that little bit of information belongs under, “shopping,” or, “things I want,” you can do both.

You can choose to view only your Top 10 Tags, or all of them.  Beware, though, you can make yourself nuts with too many tags.

Bookmarking

I love applications that do the thinking (and the legwork) for me.  I don’t want to have to run all over creation online to bookmark something, and Delicious has made a totally easy, seamless way for me to not have to.

You can bookmark your favorite pages a bunch of different ways:

1. Hand-key them into your Delicious page.
2. Import them from another program (not to fear, you don’t have to re-bookmark everything under the sun, they have a handy import feature for the stuff you’ve already saved in IE, FireFox, Safari, whatever…)
3. Use the browser toolbar.

#3 is quite possibly (maybe second only to Google Reader) the best thing that ever happened to my internet life.  It sits right up there next to my address bar and lets me (from left to right):

1. Go directly to my Delicious page.
2. View my bookmarks in a little pop-in sidebar in my browser.
3. Bookmark the page I’m currently on, with tags AND the ability to send to a friend.

Bookmark Count, Sorting, Tagging, and Sending to Friends

Delicious keeps track of a few things. Most notably, it tells you how many bookmarks you have and how many other people have bookmarked the same thing.

On the right you see a few things.  The number in the dark gray box is the total count of my bookmarks.  The blue boxes are the number of other folks who have bookmarked the same page.  It’s like a popularity ranking.

You can also see my tags (light gray boxes with arrows… career, design, shopping, etc.) and who I’ve sent items to.  For:person is a fantastic thing.  You can tag items to be sent to other folks with Delicious accounts.  It’s a handy little feature.

My favorite thing about the new interface is the new sorting options. You can now sort alphabetically!  Wahoo!

What To Do Next?

Go get a Delicious account!  It’s so worth the setup time.