Jaysen Marais » delicious http://www.jaysenmarais.com/blog Making it happen, bit by bit Sat, 10 Apr 2010 10:19:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Synchronize bookmarks with Delicious & Firefox http://www.jaysenmarais.com/blog/20090502/delicious http://www.jaysenmarais.com/blog/20090502/delicious#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 22:35:40 +0000 jaysen http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/?p=223 The web is awesome, but managing URLs is a pain. That pain is magnified if you use multiple machines and made worse if you use multiple operating systems (not to mention home vs. work, desktop vs. phone etc). There are roughly a million ways to handle this problem. Here’s mine.

synchronizing bookamrks between multiple computers and OSes using delicious

Step 1. Move bookmarks to delicious.com

About 2 years ago I moved all my bookmarks to delicious.com, a ‘social bookmarking’ service which stores your bookmarks and enables you to access, share and organize (via tagging) these bookmarks over the web. Over time it’s become second nature to save anything interesting I find to my delicious account.

delicious.com screenshot

Step 2. Install delicious.com browser extension

Whilst delicious (and its ilk) can be used via the web interface, things really get interesting when you install the relevant browser extensions. These give you an experience much like regular browser-based bookmarking, but with synchronization and superior bookmark search.

Step 3. Specify “everyday” bookmarks

specifying favourite tagsWe all have bookmarks we use everyday. Delicious allows me to group mine together by applying a common tag (I use the tag “me”). I then tell the Delicious Bookmarks extension for firefox that the “me” tag denotes my favourites and viola! All my everyday bookmarks appear in Firefox’s toolbar. Better still, any additions or edits I make to this list of favourite bookmarks are propagated across all my browsers and computers.

Step 4. Bring on the favicons!

Although the Delicious extension for Firefox is great, it pays too much head to Firefox conventions for my liking. Specifically it doesn’t display favicons on mac (firefox doesn’t do toolbar favicons on mac by default) and doesn’t offer the ability to hide toolbar labels (which take up space). Luckily Firefox is highly customizable so I’ve managed to put together a simple Firefox extension which overrides these design decisions (and fix an intermittent “huge favicon” issue on mac Firefox). Behold: my Delicious Bookmarks Toolbar extension.

the 'Delicious Bookmarks Toolbar' extension replaces the Delicious Bookmark labels with favicons (mac & pc)

By the way, if you thought this blog post was written simply as an excuse to link to that simple extension, you’d be right.

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