Power Browsing: Turn The del.icio.us Bookmarks Extension Into An Essential Web Toolkit
By Gerard McGarry on 12th April 2007, filed in Social Networking. You can leave a response below. Tags: del.icio.us, Social Bookmarking, Tips
Since del.icio.us launched their Bookmarks extension for FireFox, a number of new features have made it easier to harness the power of your bookmarks.
Possibly the greatest of these is the Bookmarks Toolbar which gets added to the browser. You can use the toolbar to display bookmarks three ways:
- Imported toolbar items: When you install the plugin originally, del.icio.us bookmarks any items you had on the toolbar and tags them
firefox:toolbar. - Bookmarks by tag: My personal favourite – this allows you to select favourite tags and creates a menu out of each tag.
- Bookmarks by bundle: del.icio.us allows you to create groups of tags – this view lists each bundle as a top-level menu and individual tag names as submenus.
Creating Your Toolkit From Tags
The key to displaying your most used websites is to group them into useful sets of tags. For example, I might visit my Gmail account, my RSS reader, stats packages, Google calendar on a daily basis. So, I’ll bookmark all of these pages and tag them quicklinks.
Now, to get that tag to appear as a drop-down menu, click the del.icio.us log on the toolbar and select Manage favourite tags. Type the name of the tag into the box and click add. It will appear in your list of favourite tags, where you can choose to have the bookmarks appear in alphabetical or chronological order.
Other Power Tag Ideas
I’ve got a couple of ideas for tag groups that could really work (including some I use myself).
- Bookmarklets
- Advertising and affiliate tracking: Store all your advertising and affiliate sites under one handy tag.
- Web stats/analytics packages
- Your favourite social networking sites.
- Your favourite news/blog resources. RSS readers, aggregators, news websites. All in one place.
You’ve probably got other ideas for how this could be used. If so, share them in the links below.
Using Your Tag Toolbar
The beauty of the toolbar is that with one click you can open all bookmarks under a given tag across multiple tabs in FireFox. So, if you’ve grouped your bookmarks correctly, you can save a whole lot of time just opening up various websites!
Simply right-click on the tag name and choose the option “Open In Tabs”.
Bookmarklets and Privacy in del.icio.us Toolbar
When I first installed the Bookmarks extension, all my social networking bookmarklets disappeared. I was a bit disherartened about this, but the good news is del.icio.us Bookmarks has support for Bookmarklets.
Where you would normally drag a bookmarklet to the toolbar, just right-click the link in your browser window and select “Bookmark this page in del.icio.us”. I use a “bookmarklets” tag to organise these and have it appear on my toolbar for easy access.
When you’re bookmarking blocks of JavaScript like bookmarklets, you’ll notice that these are not shared with other del.icio.us users. This is for security. Similarly, when you bookmark something you want to keep private, make sure you opt to NOT share it!
