[part of the the Lifehacking 101 series]
OK, so a couple weeks ago I promised to start posting some notes to help the Nav get his new powerbook rocking along and in the process try to help pull along some other WB readers into the wonderful world of lifehacks.
This week, we’ll start with how to browse the web and keep track of bookmarks. You may think you are pretty adept at web browsing but chances are there are some tools that can make the web work better for you by adopting some new tools and techniques. Specifcally, we’re referring here to the Firefox web browser and the del.icio.us bookmark tool.
Firefox is a kickass web browser that is OS agnostic (read: it will run just as nicely on Nav’s new mac as it will on other reader’s PCs). I don’t need to throw on my Firefox marketing hat. Tons of folks have already covered that ground but this Firefox Why-How Guide is pretty helpful as far as an overview.
You’ll want to start by downloading and installing Firefox from here. One you get it up and running (which is a totally no-brainer process but I’m certain to get a phone call from Nav tonight on this ;-), you’ll probably want to cruise over to the Extensions Download page to add some cool extensions to the browser. Extensions let you modify the default browser functionality. The ones that I use (WebDeveloper and Tabbed Browsing Prefs) might be overkill for your needs, but there are all sorts of cool ones that are infinitely useful like AdBlock that prevent ads from showing up or something called Don’t Bug Me (I think) that does auto login on sites that require you to login, like the NYTimes site. (If you know what plugin i’m talking about here, put it in the comments).
So, now you’ve got Firefox rolling right along. The first habit you’ll want to pick up is to use the tabs. Here’s some info on exploiting tabbed browsing. Basically, once you start using tabbed browsing, you won’t end up having a dozen or so web browsers open on your Desktop. Instead, you’ll have one browser with a dozen tabs that you can quickly jump through. Once you get the hang of tabbed browsing, you’ll probably want to setup your homepage to be several pages as detailed here. This way, when you open up your browser, you’ll have several tabs already ready to go with my.yahoo.com and google and WB all opened up and ready to roll.
Having a good, solid open source web browser is only the first step to making web browsing better. The next step is to keep track of all those pages you find that you want to remember to visit. In the past, bookmarks were a pretty convienient way to keep track of things like this. But the problem with bookmarks as they’ve been used in the past is that they’re (for the most part) local to your machine. So what happens is you’re surfing around at home and find a great page and bookmark it. The next day, when you get to work, you don’t have access to that bookmark so now you’re going to blow your lunch hour trying to retrace your steps from Google. Enter del.icio.us
del.icio.us solves this problem by taking the bookmarks off of your local machine and putting them out on the web. So when you’re at home and you find something, you put it on del.icio.us and when you get to work, you hit your del.icio.us page and there’s that link you were looking for. Of course, if this is all del.icio.us did, it would hardly be worth the effort to get in the habit of using it. I don’t have time to cover all the ways that del.icio.us can help you keep track of stuff, but one thing that’s worth mentioning right off the bat is tags. So let’s walk through tagging some sites in del.icio.us
the first thing you need to do is register for an account on the del.icio.us server. There’s not many things on the web that i take the time to register for. This is one of those things.
after setting up an account, you’ll need to login to del.icio.us
visit the “post” page and right click the “post to del.icio.us” link and select “bookmark this link . . .” item. This will add a new bookmark to you bookmarks menu called “post to del.icio.us.” Alternatively, you can drag the “popup post to del.icio.us” link to your firefox toolbar. (note however, that the popup window this launches tends to open behind your current firefox window, so it can be confusing if you don’t expect it).
now that you’ve got the del.icio.us bookmark in place, go ahead and visit a page that you want to add to your del.icio.us account. Now, with that page opened in your web browser, go ahead and select the “post to delicious” bookmark. This will bring up a new window. The url will already be filled out to contain the address of the page your were just looking at. The description is the page title, you can leave it as the default or call it something more intuitive. The tags field will be blank. Here’s where you want to put in one or more keywords related to the site, words such as: music news blogs politics, whatever. When you hit “Save” it will add that page to your del.icio.us account.
Now, when you want to view all the sites that you’ve added to del.icio.us you simply visit http://del.icio.us/YOUR_USERNAME and voila, there are your bookmarks. So for example, you can see all my bookmarks at; http://del.icio.us/sjwillis/ But the tags that you added also help to organize those bookmarks. So if you’ve added a few dozen pages to your del.icio.us account and you tagged a few of them as being music related you can visit http://del.icio.us/YOUR_USERNAME/music and see just those bookmarks (mine would be here: http://del.icio.us/sjwillis/music ).
The fact that these are “public” bookmarks that anyone can view means you shouldn’t bookmark your banking login. But you also stand to gain quite a bit through the public nature of this tool, in that the url http://del.icio.us/tag/music will show you ALL bookmarks tagged as music by any del.icio.us user. So, using del.icio.us becomes a way not only to easily manage your own bookmarks, but to very, very easily share your good finds.
That being said, if you do end up setting up a del.icio.us account and you want to setup a tag of willisbros, i could very make it so that any link you add to your del.icio.us account with the tag of willisbros ends up over in the right gutter of the blog. It would sort of be a cocktail of all of our various finds.
