so delicious
So, I’ve been pretty obsessed with del.icio.us lately, and last week my boss wanted to know why. Here we go.
- del.icio.us lets me access my bookmarks from anywhere. Sure, there are crazy ways to sync bookmarks across multiple machines, but I like being able to pull up some link from my friends’ machines, too. Often it’s much easier to find something saved in del than it is to google for it.
- del.icio.us has made actual browser bookmarks useful again. I used to have this insane bookmarks folder and I was always organizing it and moving shit around and I could never FIND anything and often it just ended up being a list of a few thousand links I was never going to do anything with again. Now, though, I have maybe a dozen sites bookmarked. I never ever open my bookmarks folder or look at my list — everything has a keyword assigned or an icon next to the URL box (for instance, I just type “g” in the location bar to look at gmail, and “t” to look at my tickets at work). Bookmarks are actually useful to me now, instead of being just a junk drawer.
- del.icio.us has increased my productivity. The background here is: I get a little antsy reading or hearing about GTD because many of its adherents are so annoyingly self-righteous and preachy about it, but there are a few of its tenets I buy into. The main one is that, when stuff flies into my head, I need to do something with it right away — put it into a system of some sort — and get it out of my head, allowing me to focus on whatever the hell I’m doing. I need to trust my system, and it needs to run mostly in the background. (For example, my mail checks itself every 15 minutes and then my computer notifies me that I have new mail. If I didn’t trust that to work, the system would be useless, because I would always be checking my e-mail manually and I would never get anything done.) One of the ways I use del.icio.us for this is my .checkthisout tag. Any time I find myself looking at a page that I know I am going to need later, but it’s not really relevant to what I am doing right now, I throw it in del and close the goddamn tab. This could be documentation or a blog post on some new python module or a piece of software that looks interesting that I want to test at some point. I subscribe to that tag via RSS, and the stuff there ends up in my ‘inbox.’ (Not my e-mail inbox; the ‘inbox’ is the GTD information-collector, the funnel for the data stream that comes out of my head, the big list of Everything I Need To Deal With In Some Manner, whether that manner is to put it on a do-this-next-week list or to read a blog post or to download some software or to send an e-mail). I periodically go through the inbox and deal with everything that’s in it, and the advantage to this is that I deal with everything I need to deal with at a set time, rather than just sort of as it comes up, which is hugely distracting.
- del.icio.us hits every OCD button I’ve got. (I have many.) I can use it as an exhaustive archive of everything I have ever thought was cool. I can spend all kinds of time thinking about tagging and organizing and bundling and systems. I can think about how to bend it to my will (see above bullet point). Etc.
- del.icio.us also hits a lot of my more academic interests in shit like organically grown folksonomies and organizational structures and data categorization andandand. FASCINATING.
- del.icio.us is for sharing! I have some friends without del accounts (crazy!) or who don’t check them very often, so I have a tag that is their name and they subscribe to that tag via RSS. For my friends with del accounts, I am often sending them things, and I get an awesomely warm-and-fuzzy feeling whenever I see they have saved a link I’ve sent them. It’s like, hey, I sent you something and you think it is awesome enough to keep! Hooray! That is a pretty cool feeling.
- del.icio.us is technologically interesting and accessible. It has a decently well-documented API that I can hit and do cool shit with. I have only been programming for six months or so, and I would consider only the last three months of that to have been “actual” programming (whatever that means). But I am able to write little scripts using del’s functionality to make it better and more useful for myself and for other people. I’ve written a thing to tag broken links as broken, and I’m working on a mass uploader script, and I’m working on an RSS feed freshener, and… those are pretty cool projects, but they’re things that are simple and small enough that I can get my not-very-programmer-like arms around them. And yet, if I can make them awesome, they will be INCREDIBLY useful to a lot of people who are like me.
So, there you have it. That is why I am obsessed with del.icio.us. And why I think everyone else should be, too!
Tags: del.icio.us
del.icio.us is one of those things where I first said ’so what?’ but now can’t live without it. Particularly nice is the Readeroo plugin for Firefox which builds a sort of stack f items you want to read later (like you described), the problem is my stack grew very big very fast. Still, I find it more manageable than trying to do that w/ built-in browser bookmarks.
Best of luck with the bending it to your will bit, I have looked into the API and have experiments of my own in mind, for me to do in my not-so-copious free time.