diigo vs delicious, and how to set up diigo
There are several reasons I have accounts on two social bookmarking sites. Mostly, I began by wanting a back-up site for my recs on delicious; but having now compared the functionality of diigo and delicious, diigo is the clear winner in nearly all respects.
Social bookmarking
Ironically, delicious wins this category. I started out on delicious because everyone else in fandom was using it, and that meant I could tap into the recs other people were posting and have a good chance of finding things I'd be interested in reading without having to wade through whole newsletters. The 'Subscription' feed is brilliant for this -- I can find everything with the 'torchwood' tag (for instance) that other people think worth bookmarking. I also pick up a lot of meta and vid recs from my Network, plus sooper-dooper stories in fandoms I don't follow. I actually scan these feeds to find things more often than my flist now, and the noise to content ratio is better (don't get me wrong, I love my flist's noise, but I just don't have as much time to read now, so prioritising is more important).
Diigo doesn't have this infrastructure in place, as fandom hasn't picked it up en masse in the same way. So I still use delicious for the social bookmarking aspect. However, after delicious had suffered service interruptions a few times, I started getting more serious about backing up my library of links. That's why I first signed up for diigo, and after testing it out, I pretty much moved over to using it for everything other than the reading feed.
Web 2 functionality
The thing about diigo is that it has added functionality that's way ahead of that offered by delicious. For instance, when I bookmark something on diigo, it will automagically push the bookmark out to delicious for me, with no extra effort on my part. I can also automagically post the links to twitter, to livejournal and various other places, if I so wish.
Behind the cut, I give a quick run-down of the neat tools I use on diigo, and how to set them up.
Importing and Exporting Bookmarks
Using the 'tools' menu, you can 'Import Bookmarks' from a variety of sources, including delicious, connotea, and your browser. You can also 'Export Bookmarks' to several formats, including delicious, RSS and Explorer.
I imported all my delicious bookmarks, and from then on I've used diigo to push out new bookmarks to delicious, so that both sites ended up mirroring my content. With regards to settings: if you mark something private on diigo, it bookmarks as private on delicious; tags work much the same way on both, although diigo converts the virgule '/' to an underscore '_'.
Bookmarking
You can install the diigo toolbar to most major browsers, or you can use the "diigolet" button which allows one-click bookmarking. You can find both on the 'tools' menu, and they are easy to install and use.
I have both of these, but I actually use a hotkey to bookmark. You can set this up as follows:
Saving to delicious
This is such a popular function that there's a pre-made option for it in the 'tools' menu. You just need to put in your username and password for your delicious account.
Auto Blog Post
This is super-awesome! Diigo will automatically post your bookmarks to LiveJournal for you. You can see what this looks like at rec-room. ETA: This tool posts to personal LJ's only, not communities (for me, it's posted to cupidsbow, and I repost to rec-room).
Choose 'Auto Blog Post' from the 'tools' menu. You put in your livejournal details, and tell diigo to create a post out of your public bookmarks (you can also tell if it you just want certain tags to be used). It can do it as often as you like, and you can create more than one post (so one for 'Stargate: Atlantis', say, and one for 'Torchwood', and one for 'meta'). I have mine set for all tags every 24 hours. Occasionally diigo glitches and a post gets missed, but it's rare.
To post to LJ, just click on 'add a new blog', choose 'LiveJournal' as your service and fill in the empty prompts.
If you are using DreamWidth, here is an Auto Blog Post cludge for you based on the LJ code. I haven't tested this yet, but
hope/angstslashhope is in the process of trying it out. It validates, so I think it will work.
Enhanced Linkrolls
Again, you can find this from the 'tools' menu. It allows you to create a dynamic embed code of your bookmarks (or for a specific tag), so that you can display the most recent bookmarks on a website, blog, etc. So if you run a community for Femslash, for instance, you could embed the 20 most recent bookmarks with the tag 'femslash' into the stickypost. I haven't used this yet, but I belong to a few groups who use it. Which brings me to...
Groups
Click on the My Groups tab and you can set up groups for people with common interests. You can share specific links and tags and blogrolls and stuff.
Many other features
There are heaps of other nifty features too, like sticky notes you can turn into blog posts, plus a heap of stuff I haven't really had a chance to try as I don't have much of a network there yet. Many of the features are designed to make sharing in groups quick and easy.
Anyway, there you have it: the quick and dirty guide to diigo. If you end up giving it a try, let me know and I can add you to my network.
This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/332715.html.
Social bookmarking
Ironically, delicious wins this category. I started out on delicious because everyone else in fandom was using it, and that meant I could tap into the recs other people were posting and have a good chance of finding things I'd be interested in reading without having to wade through whole newsletters. The 'Subscription' feed is brilliant for this -- I can find everything with the 'torchwood' tag (for instance) that other people think worth bookmarking. I also pick up a lot of meta and vid recs from my Network, plus sooper-dooper stories in fandoms I don't follow. I actually scan these feeds to find things more often than my flist now, and the noise to content ratio is better (don't get me wrong, I love my flist's noise, but I just don't have as much time to read now, so prioritising is more important).
Diigo doesn't have this infrastructure in place, as fandom hasn't picked it up en masse in the same way. So I still use delicious for the social bookmarking aspect. However, after delicious had suffered service interruptions a few times, I started getting more serious about backing up my library of links. That's why I first signed up for diigo, and after testing it out, I pretty much moved over to using it for everything other than the reading feed.
Web 2 functionality
The thing about diigo is that it has added functionality that's way ahead of that offered by delicious. For instance, when I bookmark something on diigo, it will automagically push the bookmark out to delicious for me, with no extra effort on my part. I can also automagically post the links to twitter, to livejournal and various other places, if I so wish.
Behind the cut, I give a quick run-down of the neat tools I use on diigo, and how to set them up.
Importing and Exporting Bookmarks
Using the 'tools' menu, you can 'Import Bookmarks' from a variety of sources, including delicious, connotea, and your browser. You can also 'Export Bookmarks' to several formats, including delicious, RSS and Explorer.
I imported all my delicious bookmarks, and from then on I've used diigo to push out new bookmarks to delicious, so that both sites ended up mirroring my content. With regards to settings: if you mark something private on diigo, it bookmarks as private on delicious; tags work much the same way on both, although diigo converts the virgule '/' to an underscore '_'.
Bookmarking
You can install the diigo toolbar to most major browsers, or you can use the "diigolet" button which allows one-click bookmarking. You can find both on the 'tools' menu, and they are easy to install and use.
I have both of these, but I actually use a hotkey to bookmark. You can set this up as follows:
- Once you've installed the diigo toolbar, choose 'Options'
- Go to the 'Keyboard' tab
- Set up the hotkeys you prefer (I use Ctrl+r)
Saving to delicious
This is such a popular function that there's a pre-made option for it in the 'tools' menu. You just need to put in your username and password for your delicious account.
Auto Blog Post
This is super-awesome! Diigo will automatically post your bookmarks to LiveJournal for you. You can see what this looks like at rec-room. ETA: This tool posts to personal LJ's only, not communities (for me, it's posted to cupidsbow, and I repost to rec-room).
Choose 'Auto Blog Post' from the 'tools' menu. You put in your livejournal details, and tell diigo to create a post out of your public bookmarks (you can also tell if it you just want certain tags to be used). It can do it as often as you like, and you can create more than one post (so one for 'Stargate: Atlantis', say, and one for 'Torchwood', and one for 'meta'). I have mine set for all tags every 24 hours. Occasionally diigo glitches and a post gets missed, but it's rare.
To post to LJ, just click on 'add a new blog', choose 'LiveJournal' as your service and fill in the empty prompts.
If you are using DreamWidth, here is an Auto Blog Post cludge for you based on the LJ code. I haven't tested this yet, but
hope/angstslashhope is in the process of trying it out. It validates, so I think it will work.
- Click on 'add a new blog'
- Fill out the drop-down boxes as follows:
- Blog Type/Service: LiveJournal
- Blog Id: post
- Your Blog URL: http://[yourdreamwidthusername].dreamwidth.org/
- Blog Name: [your DreamWidth title or subtitle]
- Endpoint: http://www.dreamwidth.com/interface/xmlrpc
- Username: [your DreamWidth username]
- Password: [your DreamWidth password]
- Blog Type/Service: LiveJournal
- Click on 'Submit'
Enhanced Linkrolls
Again, you can find this from the 'tools' menu. It allows you to create a dynamic embed code of your bookmarks (or for a specific tag), so that you can display the most recent bookmarks on a website, blog, etc. So if you run a community for Femslash, for instance, you could embed the 20 most recent bookmarks with the tag 'femslash' into the stickypost. I haven't used this yet, but I belong to a few groups who use it. Which brings me to...
Groups
Click on the My Groups tab and you can set up groups for people with common interests. You can share specific links and tags and blogrolls and stuff.
Many other features
There are heaps of other nifty features too, like sticky notes you can turn into blog posts, plus a heap of stuff I haven't really had a chance to try as I don't have much of a network there yet. Many of the features are designed to make sharing in groups quick and easy.
Anyway, there you have it: the quick and dirty guide to diigo. If you end up giving it a try, let me know and I can add you to my network.
This entry was originally posted at http://cupidsbow.dreamwidth.org/332715.html.