Cross Platform Bookmarking with Delicious

Personally I never saw the use for Bookmarking tools until I started having 20+ tabs open. Then bookmarking tabs became the only way that I could keep track of them. I would bookmark a tab, close it and just get back to it whenever I had time later on. The default bookmark manager was more than up to that simple task. And then I started working with multiple browsers and multiple locations and things got a little more confusing. Suddenly, it wasn’t as simple as hitting a button anymore. I needed a way that I could not only bookmark items but also look up these bookmarks on a computer where I couldn’t install addon’s. I needed to be able to access it from a multitude of browsers and 2 different OS’es.

After much searching on the net, I settled with Delicious.

To start off with, Delicious requires you to create an account with them. Registration is free, and only takes a few moments. Lukily, I had already registered my name when Delicious first started (it’s a habitI have) so I logged in and took a look around. What you’ll want to do once your in is either add the add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, or grab the bookmarklet if you’re using anything else. I’d recommend going through the Quick Tour pages as it covers setup and basic use of it. Since I’m using Firefox as my default browser, the rest of the screens will be from the addon installed on that.

Since I only need to see my bookmarks and add new ones, I’ve customized the interface a little. First off, I right clicked near the address bar and select Customize and then dragged the following two icons to my single toolbar interface.

The first icon is the “Tag” icon. It lets you quickly save a page to your Delicious library. So when you stumble on a page you want to save, clicking it opens  a little form for you to fill out. Hit save to add the link to your library.

The other link simply opens a little sidebar that lets you browse through your bookmarks and open them up and re-organize (tagging, deletion, renaming etc).

Short of registering your account on Delicious, you never actually need to set a foot on the website since prettymuch everything can be managed right through your browser.

If you’re looking for a cross-browser bookmarking service, definitely go with Delicious!