4/20. Del.icio.us. No, it's not food, rather a new way to keep bookmarks to your favorite Web sites organized on-line so you can pull them up on more than one computer. Taking a strong hint from the professor a few class periods ago, I decided to test-drive and give somewhat of a wordy review of this Internet innovation.
The site, which markets itself as "social bookmarking," allows users to consolidate often-used Internet sites and pages on one, easy-to-use database. Going on a road trip anytime soon? Don't bring the computer if you are just looking to surf the net. Just login to your del.icio.us account on any available Mac or PC and you've got all of the comforts of home at your fingertips.
In fact, it's a Safari-based Web site, meaning it is optimized for Mac users, like me (I found this to be a very good quality). For those not using Safari, del.icio.us gives equally helpful alternative instructions for Firefox, Opera, and Explorer.
Registration is relatively easy. The first step asks for things such as a username, password, and an e-mail address--a no-brainer. The second asks the user to drag two icons--labeled "post to del.icio.us" and "my del.icio.us"--into his bookmarks (for Safari registration, anyway), which is almost as quick and painless. A mere button tutorial is listed as the third step, which gives the user the option of saving the current page to their account ("post to ...") or viewing his saved pages ("my ...").
I tried out the buttons on the common "facebook" site. Upon getting to that page, I clicked the "post to" button, which activated a page that asked what I should name it and if I wanted to "tag" it. I decided to forgo the tag and just save it to my account. Upon checking my saved sites, I found "Facebook | Welcome to Facebook" sitting alone on my page, although apparently 6164 individuals had already saved it as a link as well.
Seeing my lonely "facebook" link made me a bit trigger-happy, and by the end of it all I had five other items on my del.icio.us page. I felt it was a waste of time manually clicking on individual pages I had previously bookmarked on my computer and adding them to my account.
To solve this, I went to the "settings" link on my account's page and scrolled down to the "Bookmarks" section. From there, I clicked "Import/Upload" button, which took me to a page that said to click "Export Bookmarks" from my "File" menu. After that, I uploaded my Safari bookmarks to the page and clicked the "Import Bookmarks" button.
It quickly loaded the bookmarks onto del.icio.us, and I was onto the new task: trying it out on another computer. I went on my roommate's Dell (without asking, mind you), used Firefox to log in to my account and found that all of the bookmarks I had uploaded from the Big Mac were there.
Overall, I was pleased with the smooth operation of the Web site. My biggest concerns were my bookmarks were not listed alphabetically (which I am still trying to do) and the layout of the page was a bit messy. Aside from that, I found del.icio.us to be a very easy-to-use technological advancement.
Information for this post was obtained from my use of the del.icio.us Web site.
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