Bookmarking with Firefox and del.icio.us

September 30, 2004

With Firefox and del.icio.us I rediscovered the use of bookmarking.

I always found bookmarking too tedious for several reasons.

First, I gave up on categorizing bookmarks because I never found a hierarchy that satisfied me. So all my bookmarks end in the "to classify" folder and never moved from there!

Another inconvenient is that bookmarks are tedious to share between different computers. I don't want to transfer my bookmarks between all the browser I use on different computers. So what I wanted are bookmarks stored on a server. But then it couldn't be integrated in the browser and I'd have to go to the web page every time I want to go to a page I bookmarked.

So, at the end of the day, I restrict my bookmarks use to only two specific cases:

bookmarklets (such a BlogThis!, post to del.icio.us, ...)
web pages that I want to access through customized keywords (dict:, bug:,...)

For the rest, I rely on the browser location bar history and Google. But this solution is not good enough.

At the same time, I started to use del.icio.us to keep an eye on interesting web pages. Del.icio.us comes with handy bookmarklets which makes it easy to add a bookmark to del.icio.us without going to the web site. Del.icio.us has also interesting social effects and is in itself a source of information to check what other people are bookmarking.

However, to use your bookmarks, you still have to go to their web site.

Finally, enter firefox 1.0 PR and its live bookmarks. I added a live bookmark on my del.icio.us feed and voila! I had what I wanted: shared bookmarks, integrated in the browser that I can use as is (I don't have to go to del.icio.us site anymore).

Cedric also gave me a good idea: I added a second live bookmarks for the del.icio.us bookmarks I tagged with "toread" for pages I plan to read later when I got some time. It quite easy to categorize my bookmarks in the browser, I just have to use del.icio.us feeds for the different tags I use. But all in all, a feed for the "toread" tag and another for all my bookmarks seem enough.