UPDATE: With the recent uncertainty surrounding Delicious why not try one of these alternatives that we are currently trialling Licorize, Pinboard and Diigo. Please note that we are sticking with Delicious in the short-term as it won’t be disappearing overnight but given the uncertainty we’re definitely looking at alternatives. Shame on you Yahoo!!!
I’ve recently completed testing more efficient ways to share our bookmarks. Previously we shared links internally and with clients by writing a weekly round-up post on our blog.
Not only was this time consuming it wasn’t user-friendly.
So why persist for so long?
Habit.
Even though we knew we should have transitioned to something like Reddit, StumbleUpon or Delicious we never did.
Why? Because it was such a simple thing to do it kept on being put off. Not good I know, hence this post to absolve my guilt!
The Options
After playing around with Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious and looking into the usage stats of each we’ve settled on using Delicious. You can check out our account here.
Getting Started
With Delicious importing your bookmarks is a breeze:
First off, you will need to save your browser bookmarks.
If you are not sure how to do this, create a Delicious account and follow the detailed instructions for Firefox, IE 6 & 7, Opera. Please note you must be signed-in to access this page.
In addition to the supported browsers this works fine in Safari too (go to “File” and select “Export Bookmarks”). Although Chrome on OSX is still lacking a bookmark exporter there are work-arounds available.
Once you’ve done this pop over to Delicious and create your account if you haven’t already:
- Click on Settings
- Click on Import/Upload Bookmarks
- Choose the File to Upload
- Click on the Import Now button
The import process is surprisingly quick and there is an email notification option that tells you when it’s completed.
Once the import is complete you can start sorting through your tags and the Bulk Edit feature is very useful for this.
Other features you should check out:
- Export/Backup bookmarks feature makes it simple to download a copy of your bookmarks for safe-keeping. We would recommend doing this regularly.
- Link Rolls/Tag Rolls is an easily enabled feature that allows you to display your latest Delicious bookmarks/tags on your website or blog.
- Blog Posting is an experimental feature that can automatically post entries containing your latest links to your blog every day. This isn’t something we are currently using but it is something we would be interested in using in the future.
Conclusion
Delicious is a great solution for sharing and storing your bookmarks online.
It is easy-to-use and its import/export features work well. The extra settings available means you can also customise the way Delicious works.
All in all we are really happy with Delicious but as with any hosted solution we’d always suggest you continue to maintain a regular backup procedure.