del.icio.us
For the third time in the past month, I’ve seen one of you talk about having to get links into an LJ post for fear that you’ll never find them again if you close your browser tabs. While I certainly don’t mind seeing the links, I shudder to think that so many of you may be relying on your browsers not crashing for days or weeks at a time, so I’m going to tell y’all about one of the handiest web services around: del.icio.us.
It’s a free social bookmarking service. I’ve been using it for a couple of years; it was down a lot at first, but it’s been reliable recently. You can auto-import your browser’s bookmarks file, but I didn’t bother, because that’s not how I use it. For me, my bookmarks file is for stuff I use a lot (so I get auto-completion in my location bar, and scanning by Quicksilver), while del.icio.us is for long-term storage of links I’ll want to find again later, with tagged-based sorting so I’ll be able to find them.
Here’s how it works: When you find a page you think you’ll want to find later, pop it into your del.icio.us account, along with a brief description and a few tags. Months or years later, when you’re thinking “I knew I bookmarked an article a while back about anti-abortion activists who get abortions anyway”, you just go to your account, click the tag for abortion, and hey, there it is.
More tags: Here's everything I've tagged with history. And here’s everything that I’ve tagged with both mac and freeware.
(Note: Tags on del.icio.us are space delimited. Tags in LiveJournal are comma delimited. The difference will probably annoy you at some point.)
And since it’s a social service, you can see other people’s tags, subscribe to other users or tags, even recommend a link to a particular user. Here’s the Help page. If you use del.icio.us with Firefox, you’ll want to use the official extension - it gives you a button in your menubar that you can click that pops up a window with the URL and title of the current web page already entered, and it does type-ahead completion with your tags.