OK, I’m back. Back using del.icio.us, I mean. I took about a 6-month hiatus.
Bookmarks suck. They especially suck if they’re just on one of my computers, but they even suck when they’re on the web. When they’re on del.icio.us.
Well, perhaps I should modify that. They don’t suck (at least not very hard) when they’re on del.icio.us. The point of maximal suckage is actually getting them onto del.icio.us. It sucks even more than typing del period icio period us five times in one post.
Unfortunately, how else are you going to track where you’ve been on the web and what has caught your eye? So I’m back to using del.icio.us after suffering 6 months of dweebish bookmarklessness. But it still sucks.
Here’s what I have to do when I find something I like (and think, foolishly, that I’ll want to see again):
1) click a button on my browser toolbar that takes me to my account on del.icio.us
2) ensure that in addition to the URL of the page I want to bookmark, the description is filled in. If the page doesn’t have a good title, it won’t be. Fill it in.
3) if I want to have a hope of finding it again later on, tag it with 3-5 tags that make sense, fit with whatever else I’ve tagged, and don’t unnecessarily duplicate previous tags (e.g. sometimes using “tag” and sometimes “tags” for exactly the same concept)
4) click Save
5) my browser refreshes back to the now-bookmarked page.
(Note: and this is saving a couple of steps by having the button on my toolbar. And assuming that I have the account on del.icio.us. And assuming I have the tech-savvy to know there’s a toolbar shortcut, and where it is, and how to get it, etc. etc. etc.)
This is painful! It takes at least 45 to 90 seconds, if the tags are immediately obvious, and plus it’s a disruption to what I’m focusing on, searching for, learning about, or reading.
However, there’s apparently nothing better available right now. At least as far as I can tell.
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FYI … you can kind of watch my clickstream now, as I’m pulling in my latest 5 or so saved bookmarks into the right column way down there in the hinterlands of this blog under the archive links.