I've blogged about the wonder that is del.icio.us a few months back. Today I want to share a power tip about using del.icio.us
with Firefox's Live bookmarks.
Firefox provides the ability to bookmark any RSS feeds just as you would bookmark a URL. The cool thing is that when
you bookmark a RSS feed in Firefox as a live bookmark, it will automatically updated for you when the feed contents
are updated. No extensions neccessary. By using the live bookmark feature, you can have up to date bookmarks wherever
you browse with Firefox. Here's how.
Once you have links saved on del.icio.us, you can access them by going to del.icio.us with your username and the tag
for the specific set of links you've saved. For example, to find all the bookmarks for items you've tagged as
"toread" the url is http://del.icio.us/username/toread
where username is your username. To add the live bookmark to a del.icio.us page, click on the orange RSS icon in the
address bar and select "Add 'RSS feed ...' as Live Bookmark." Click Ok to create the bookmark in
Firefox. You can create as many live bookmarks as you like. No more clumsy storage of static bookmarks in the browser
that's tied to the machine.
I keep all of my links on del.icio.us and depend on it for the convenience of organizing and accessing my bookmarks.
When combined with Firefox livebox, this feature is one I can't browse without. In fact, my live bookmarks from
del.icio.us are always readily available in the firefox toolbar.
There are some drawbacks in using del.icio.us with Firefox, though. If and when del.icio.us is down, I can't
access any of my bookmarks. This isn't too bad as del.icio.us have been really reliable, although slow at times,
and the times that it was down I don't have internet access anyway. The second drawback is that the favicons for
the links are not saved between firefox sessions since the links are dynamically created, which is merely a minor
annoyance.
There's an extension called Foxylicious that will store your delicious tags as bookmarks in Firefox. I don't
use this extension as I like to pick and choose which live bookmarks I can quickly access. This reminds me another firefox extension that I use to add the del.icio.us browser buttons available at http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension. Just follow the instructions there for installation.