A Delicious Way to Bookmark Your Favorite Web Sites
By Mark Frauenfelder June 19, 2008
Every Web browser, including Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox, has the ability to save Web addresses as "bookmarks." You can bookmark any site you are visting by choosing "Bookmark this page" from the Bookmarks menu in your Web browser. And you can visit any bookmarked site by choosing it from the "Bookmarks" menu. This is a convenient way to access sites you visit frequently, such as Google, your bank's online site, your favorite weblogs, recipes, newspapers, etc. (See my earlier article, "Managing your Bookmarks").
The problem with bookmarks is that they're stored on your computer, so if you have more than one computer, or you're surfing the Web on a friend's computer, you won't have access to your bookmarks list. To solve this, I've started saving my favorite sites to a website called Del.icio.us (that's the actual address). Del.icio.us stores your bookmarks online so you can access them from any computer that's connected to the Internet.
To use Del.icio.us, you must first register for an account (it's free). The next thing to do is install two buttons into your browser, which will allow you to easily add sites to your Del.icio.us account and to access your bookmarks. Del.icio.us will guide you through the process when you register.
Once you have Del.icio.us set up on your computer, you can bookmark any page by clicking the Tag It button on your browser. You can also add tags and descriptions of the page you're saving, which makes it easy to search for it later on even if you can't remember the name of the site. You have the option of making any page you save "Private" so that other Del.icio.us users can't see what you are saving.
An added feature of Del.icio.us is that you can search other Del.icio.us users' bookmarks. I sometimes search Del.icio.us for an answer to something before I search Google, because every website in Del.icio.us has been hand-picked by at least one person who thought it was valuable enough to bookmark. This makes the quality of the search results quite high, in my experience. (You don't need an account with Del.icio.us to use the global search feature).
