Mmm, linkage (Del.icio.us)
Since moving to Melbourne and gaining full-time employment, my online habits have changed substantially. The most prominent of these changes has been that my time online is now spread out between several locations: Home, Work and anywhere else I can grab a fix. Because of this, I have at times found it difficult to continue or even remember what I was doing online in one location when I log on in another. And so in steps Del.icio.us.
Del.icio.us has been around for a couple of years now, and provides a means to store links in an online location. I can't remember where I first read about Del.icio.us, but it's hard to go anywhere on the net nowadays without seeing the white, black and blue checkered logo. Having now setup a blog, it was only a matter of time before I began to implement Del.icio.us into my online presence, and why not start now. To be honest I wasn't really expecting to setup a Del.icio.us (god that's getting annoying to type) account until further down the track, but due to Blogger's limitations when it comes to categorising posts, I soon realised I would have to jump on this one sooner rather then later.
So I began the daunting task of tagging and uploading all of the bookmarks on all of the systems I use. I figured that even though I was actually intending on using Del.icio.us to categorise my blog posts, I should really get my bookmarks online to get the hang of the process. Signing up was pretty straightforward, as I'm beginning to expect from good Web 2.0 applications, however the interface following baffled me a little to begin with. After figuring out that Del.icio.us doesn't not work through it's own site, things started to come together. Luckily I am an avid Firefox user and many of the Del.icio.us tools are designed to be run as an extension. So I installed the official Firefox extension and began my link tagging spree.
To start with I uploaded the bookmarks I had on my home laptop manually. This worked great to begin with, but after the first 20 or so, and with no end in sight, I quickly realised that it was going to get drawn out very quickly. So I had a hunt around for a more automated approach, and again found my salvation in the Del.icio.us help page. Who would have guessed that you could just export all of your saved bookmarks into one file? ('Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > File > Export' under Firefox and 'File > Import & Export' under IE in case you were wondering) With my exported bookmarks I was then able to use the import facility on the Del.icio.us site and soon after get back to the tagging.
Although this sped things up to start with, I again got bogged down at the tagging stage. 200+ links take quite a while to sift through, and this wasn't helped by the changes I made as I went along. After a while I realised that I had started to use a slightly different tagging regime and as a result would have to go back and edit my earlier entries. Going back multiple times didn't sound too appealing, and so I figured I would just power through till then end and then reassess my work afterwards.
After whittling down the list to closer to 100 and entering notes and tags for each and every one, I sat back checked out my work. At first glance it was, in a word, ugly, a rather large list of links with notes and tags, bit not doing a whole lot. After a while though, the potential began to shine through and after setting up a couple of bundles and looking at my tag cloud I started to feel a little better about the time I had put in. It wasn't a marvel in its current state, but I could see that with some more time, and more experience from my end, Del.icio.us could fit in with my online habits very well.
Regarding the original reason why I pushed myself to get into Del.icio.us, bringing categories into Blogger, I am still a little way off, however the groundwork is there and I can see how it can work now. I will continue to work on building in this feature over the next week or so and hopefully have it up and running shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the cloud I've added to the page footer, my Del.icio.us page and keep an eye out for future changes.
Categories: Del.icio.us, Tagging, Links, Bookmarks, Firefox, Web2.0
Del.icio.us has been around for a couple of years now, and provides a means to store links in an online location. I can't remember where I first read about Del.icio.us, but it's hard to go anywhere on the net nowadays without seeing the white, black and blue checkered logo. Having now setup a blog, it was only a matter of time before I began to implement Del.icio.us into my online presence, and why not start now. To be honest I wasn't really expecting to setup a Del.icio.us (god that's getting annoying to type) account until further down the track, but due to Blogger's limitations when it comes to categorising posts, I soon realised I would have to jump on this one sooner rather then later.
So I began the daunting task of tagging and uploading all of the bookmarks on all of the systems I use. I figured that even though I was actually intending on using Del.icio.us to categorise my blog posts, I should really get my bookmarks online to get the hang of the process. Signing up was pretty straightforward, as I'm beginning to expect from good Web 2.0 applications, however the interface following baffled me a little to begin with. After figuring out that Del.icio.us doesn't not work through it's own site, things started to come together. Luckily I am an avid Firefox user and many of the Del.icio.us tools are designed to be run as an extension. So I installed the official Firefox extension and began my link tagging spree.
To start with I uploaded the bookmarks I had on my home laptop manually. This worked great to begin with, but after the first 20 or so, and with no end in sight, I quickly realised that it was going to get drawn out very quickly. So I had a hunt around for a more automated approach, and again found my salvation in the Del.icio.us help page. Who would have guessed that you could just export all of your saved bookmarks into one file? ('Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks > File > Export' under Firefox and 'File > Import & Export' under IE in case you were wondering) With my exported bookmarks I was then able to use the import facility on the Del.icio.us site and soon after get back to the tagging.
Although this sped things up to start with, I again got bogged down at the tagging stage. 200+ links take quite a while to sift through, and this wasn't helped by the changes I made as I went along. After a while I realised that I had started to use a slightly different tagging regime and as a result would have to go back and edit my earlier entries. Going back multiple times didn't sound too appealing, and so I figured I would just power through till then end and then reassess my work afterwards.
After whittling down the list to closer to 100 and entering notes and tags for each and every one, I sat back checked out my work. At first glance it was, in a word, ugly, a rather large list of links with notes and tags, bit not doing a whole lot. After a while though, the potential began to shine through and after setting up a couple of bundles and looking at my tag cloud I started to feel a little better about the time I had put in. It wasn't a marvel in its current state, but I could see that with some more time, and more experience from my end, Del.icio.us could fit in with my online habits very well.
Regarding the original reason why I pushed myself to get into Del.icio.us, bringing categories into Blogger, I am still a little way off, however the groundwork is there and I can see how it can work now. I will continue to work on building in this feature over the next week or so and hopefully have it up and running shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the cloud I've added to the page footer, my Del.icio.us page and keep an eye out for future changes.
Categories: Del.icio.us, Tagging, Links, Bookmarks, Firefox, Web2.0
posted by Adam at 9:43 PM
2 Comments:
Hmmm... Del.icio.us sounds like a good plan. At least I don't have nearly as many bookmarks as you.
It's not so bad once they're all in there and tagged, but the initial step of uploading everything can get tiring very quickly. Just for the record, to start with I had around 250 links, but after getting rid of browser defaults, dead links and links to things no-one should ever had, the list dropped in size rapidly.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home