(For this article in Spanish, click here)
There are several reasons you should probably be using “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us. If you use computers in multiple locations, say one at home and one at work, delicious can synchronize your bookmarks. This becomes even more useful if you’re using Firefox 1.0 for reasons I’ll address in a minute. Secondly, it’s a great way to keep track of things on the web.
Built in bookmarks in your browser are cool, but if you’re like me they pile up and become hard to find and manage. Delicious solves this problem by using flat hierarchy, which I’ve talked about “before”:http://www.beelerspace.com/index.php?p=806. Suffice it to say that I’ve started wishing everything on my computer used a flat hierarchy like gmail and delicious, and I wonder why it doesn’t. Thirdly, if you’re a graduate student (and I know some of you are) delicious is starting to increase in usage among the academic community. Obviously infomatics - which is a fancy word for an excuse to apply computers to something like cooking - is the first to have adopted this. I have seen no history usage, but most of the history professors I know are still using “wordperfect”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect and “PINE”:http://www.indiana.edu/~statmath/support/byos/unix/gettingstarted/pico.gif so they’re not exactly “nouveau.” Finally, finding new links on delicious’ “front page”:http://del.icio.us/ or “popular page”:http://del.icio.us/popular/ is finding links that are truly on the cutting edge. That means you know about the cat that can fart video before anyone else does, and that can help you. Somehow.
Delicious is easy to use, but it lacks any kind of serious documentation. Its interface is simple, which I find attractive, but it has that ubergeek slashdot unfriendly look to it. So, here’s the way to do it nice and easy:
1. Go “here”:http://del.icio.us/register and sign up. You don’t have to put in an email, and signup is very easy and simple. Choose a username you can remember. (Amazingchix34747 is a bad example - John Grey, I’m talking to you) “That’s it! You’re in our secret club!”:http://clientes.netvisao.pt/anmauric/blog/images/ren-stimpy.jpg
2. Go “here”:http://del.icio.us/post/, and choose your weapon of posting. I recommend at least using the pop-up one, so that your browsing experience is as uninterupted as possible. However, if you’re one of those people that have a heart attack whenever you see a pop-up, use the standard one. Don’t let the word “experimental” scare you on the fourth choice. The Heads of All Things Delicious are testing some ways to make things easier, and you’ll see after a few uses why the experimental one is better. It gives you a suggested choice of tags to add to a link if someone else has already linked to it. But if you want to be safe and stable and live in that non-experimental comfort zone, stick with the pop-up or the standard poster (second one down). Just drag whichever link you’ve chosen to your browser toolbar, and the social bookmarking monkeys behind the toolbar will anxiously await your click so they can work their magical magic. Unless they’re busy grooming, which has yet to happen to me. Just a warning.
3. Browse to your favorite website, let’s use one you visit at least once every day. We’ll assume, of course, that’s it this wonderful “egg song”:http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/eggsong website (oodle doodle!). Click on your bookmarket, whatever you named it. A pop up window will appear. In this window are several fields. The first is the url. The next is the description. Name this knowing that one day you may want to search for it again. Say, for your egg song website, “The Egg Song.” Extended is a short text field that allows you to put a few sentences about the post. “I listen to this every day!” You might say. Whatever.
The tags is where the real magic happens. Now, the key here is to get out of the folder hierarchy. _These are not folders_. These are tags, and it’s a whole different animal. You can put as many tags as you like. I think. Maybe there’s a limit, but I’ve put a lot of tags on one thing and delicious has never complained. What you’re aiming for here is two things. First, how will other people tag this, and how can I find it easily later. Spaces seperate the tags, so if you absolutely must have a space use the underscore instead. Here’s the tags I’d suggest for the Egg Song:
music eggs flash daily catchy
Whatever you put, make sure you put daily as one of the tags. Well - you can use whatever you want, but I’m going to use daily in an example in just a minute. If you’re interested, this wonderful pop up window also gives you some interesting information. If others have bookmarked this same URL/site, you can see what they wrote about it and how the tagged it. Click on save, and you’ll just bookmarked and tagged your first site.
Repeat with one more site you visit every day, making sure that you tag is “daily.”
4. You can access your bookmarks by going to http://del.icio.us/username - replacing username with whatever your username is. You’ll see a very useful search box, your bookmarks descending chronologically by addition, and your tags on the right. You should see a few tags already, and to the left of those are the number of bookmarks in each tag. Click on daily, and you’ll have two links, the two you just added. On the very right side are your tags, but a new column beside that and to the left are your related tags. You can move between tags very easily with this, but you can also add tags. In other words, if you were in your daily tag and wanted to see everything that was tagged both daily and with eggs, you would click on the word “add” beside eggs. You can do this for as deep as the matching tags go.
Also beneath those you’ll see “daily from all users.” This is where the social in social bookmarking comes from. There are no tags (at least that I’m aware of) on delicious that are private. This means you can see everyone else that has listed a tag as daily.
Back to your url. You can add a tag to that url very easily. http://del.icio.us/username/tag will take you straight to all the bookmarks you’ve tagged with that tag. In other words, http://del.icio.us/beelerspace/eggs takes you to every bookmark I’ve bookmarked as eggs. Which is the egg song. Also, http://del.icio.us/tag/eggs shows you all the bookmarks every delicious user has tagged as eggs. Substitute eggs for whatever else and it’s a fast shortcut (although not as fast as the firefox keyword search I’ll show you in a minute).
So, that’s delicious. I would suggest adding http://del.icio.us/username to your bookmark toolbar (replacing username with your username of course) for easy and quick access. And experiment. There’s really no way to break anything The worst that can happen is that you accidently delete a bookmark. Whoopie.
Optional super awesome firefox delicious abilities:
If you’re using Firefox, there are some really neat things you can do. Make sure you have at least version 1.0.
First, quick searches. We’ll set up a way for you to search your delicious bookmarks straight from the toolbar that you type the URL/website address in.
Go to Bookmarks on your firefox menu, then manage bookmarks. Highlight the Quick Searches bookmark folder in the left column. Click on File, then New Bookmark. Name it something like Search My Bookmarks. In location, cut and paste this:
http://del.icio.us/search/?search=%s
In keyword, put whatever you want to begin with to search. Mine is “del” but without the quotes. Click ok. Try it out in your main browser. Type:
del egg
And it should pull up your egg song.
Now, to search by tag. Delicious’ search interface isn’t the best right now, and sometimes I know the tag and I just want to jump to it. Easily done in firefox. Go to Bookmarks on your firefox menu, then manage bookmarks. Highlight the Quick Searches bookmark folder in the left column. Click on File, then New Bookmark. Name it Search My Tags. Location:
http://del.icio.us/search/?search=tag%3A%s
My keyword is dtag. Try it out, by typing
dtag eggs
And it should pull up your eggs tag.
Finally we’ll set up a keyword search to search every delicious user’s bookmarks. I find this useful when I’m looking, say, for a piece of software that I know others have used. Or, if you want to see what others have said about cars, or google, or whatever.
Location:
http://del.icio.us/search/all?search=%s
Keyword: dall (as of Jan 31/05, the all search on delicious has been disabled. boo.)
But it doesn’t end there. The best is yet to come. If you’re lazy like I am, that one step in browsing to your bookmarks is annoying. With Firefox’s “Live Bookmarks” you don’t have to. Go to your “daily” tag. This should be http://del.icio.us/username/daily
In the very lower right corner of the browser you’ll see a little orange icon with what looks like little radar echoes. Click on it, and select “Subscribe to RSS”. Name it “daily” (without the quotes), and create it in your BookMark Toolbar Folder which should already be created. You’ll see a little orange icon bookmark pop up on your bookmark toolbar (if you have enabled that to show in firefox - it is by default). Click on it, and voila: all your bookmarks tagged daily.
You can do do this for any delicious tag. You can also put Live Bookmarks in folders, and combine tags. For example, my blogs tag has 117 blogs in it. That’s far too many for a bookmark folder. So I created a normal Bookmark folder in firefox (Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks -> highlight Bookmarks Toolbar Folder -> New Folder, and named it blogs. Then I browsed to http://del.icio.us/beelerspace/blogs and “add”ed a tag, say family. Now my URL is
http://del.icio.us/beelerspace/blogs+family
I clicked on the Live Bookmark icon in firefox, and added it within Bookmark Toolbar Folder -> Blogs. See pictures below.
Well, that should get you started in the wonderful world of social bookmarking. Welcome to the future, until the next next bigger thing comes along.
Ask if you have any questions.
If this article helps you set up your first delicious account, hows about sharing your newfound delicious joy? Add a link to your delicious username using the comments below
It would do you well to check out “Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection,” which links to dozens of del.icio.us tools. (Added Feb. 13)

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Thank you so much for this. A big help for all the people new to delicious.
Also hope you do not mind but i provided a link to the users of my livejournal community.
If you want you can visit us at:
http://www.livejournal.com/community/firefoxusers/
Thanks again
Clayton