Thing #10: Tagging and Delicious

BEHOLD MY DELICIOUS NETWORK BADGE 

I am now officially delicious!

AN ENJOYABLE EXPERIENCE

I very much enjoyed Thing #10.  Tagging's fun, and I think Delicious is going to be very, very useful.

I'd done a little bit of tagging before now.  It's a great idea and no big deal.

I do get frustrated when the total length of tags for an item is constrained to a certain length (such as 200 characters).  I ran into that when retro-tagging all my blogposts.

And of course I'd heard about Delicious.  (Actually, I'm used to seeing it referred to by its pre-Yahoo spelling: "del.icio.us") but hadn't gotten around to checking it out till now.  I'm so glad I did!  

WHY I NEVER USED BOOKMARKS

Before now, I've never used the bookmark / favorites feature of any of my browsers.  There are three I use all the time and several others I use occasionally.  The reason for my reluctance to use bookmarks was simple: they weren't portable.

Since I move from computer to computer all day long--at work, I have the computer at my desk and five different computers on the public service desks; I also have a computer at home--it didn't help me at all that I couldn't take my bookmarks with me.

So I just memorized the URLs of the sites I visited frequently (or Googled them if I couldn't remember) and ignored bookmarks / favorites.

Now it looks like Delicious has fixed my problem.  I should be able to access my bookmarks list from any Internet-connected computer anywhere.

BACKGROUND READING

Once again, I found Lee Lefever's instructional video crystal clear, charming, and laudably succinct.

Brandon Connelly's "Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users" was informative.

So, too, was "7 Things You Should Know about . . . Social Bookmarking."

I also enjoyed skimming through the list of libraries in the melange blog on libraries that bookmark using Delicious.

SIGNING UP FOR DELICIOUS

Signing up for a Delicious account was a breeze.  The instructions for adding the bookmarklets were ultrasimple.  I added bookmarklets to five of my browsers.

Afterwards, I flitted around to 8 or 10 of my favorite harp sites and bookmarked them.  You can see them at http://delicious.com/virtualunicorn if you like.

Now I don't have to remember the URLs for those sites anymore or hunt for them, I can just find them via my Delicious account.  I like that!

My last delicious act for the day will be to add a Delicious network badge to my blog.  If this works, I'll insert it at the top of my blog just to give the beginning of the blogpost some visual interest.  Here goes.