How I Made Del.icio.us Work for Me

Just recently I have officially made the switch from Windows Bookmarks to the social-bookmarking service Del.icio.us. I had to. With over 1,000 bookmarks, it just simply wasn't manageable in the default Firefox hierarchy system. In the transition I found that Del.icio.us doesn't exactly have the most user friendly interface -- a fact I've heard voiced by several other people. So, I've decided to put down how I made Del.icio.us work for me.

Don't Use the Official Del.icio.us Firefox Extension

I strongly recommend you skip the official extension. It stinks. No, really. You have to sign in every Firefox session, the pop-up is a web page (not good for people on slow connections), and after you bookmark something, it reuses the tab you just bookmarked to take you to the Del.icio.us homepage. Not fun. And I've found that most bookmarklets are little better. So, what's a guy supposed to do?

Use the Del.icio.us Firefox Extension made by Yahoo!

I have found the Yahoo! Del.icio.us firefox extension to be superb. All your bookmarks are easily available (even when offline) in a sidebar togglable via ctrl+b. It can even (optionally) replace your Firefox bookmarks menu with a minue of it's own populated by a list of your favorite tags, which act like submenus. The extension comes with a bookmarking button which brings up a (fast loading) bookmarking dialog, allowing you to edit the title / description and add custom tags, popular tags, and/or tags suggested by Del.icio.us. The whole experience is a seamless integration of Del.icio.us into Firefox. I never even go to the Del.icio.us website anymore!

Fun Tag Cloud Thingy