OK, online tip #1.
One of my great finds of the last year has been an online bookmarking service called “delicious”, which you will find at http://del.icio.us
Anyone familiar will this sort of thing will tell you that there are a number of similar services around, but this is the one I found first, and even after flirting with one of the others (spurl.net) I have come back to delicious.
When I first discovered delicious, I was using about 5 different computers (and perhaps more at certain times) every week. All of which I might take online, find something useful and want to come back to it. This creates a very difficult situation with respect to bookmarks.
I tried a couple of firefox extension which had the potential to act as synchronisers, but didn’t have much joy.
Then along came delicious.
You have to see it to realise what it can do. And then sign up and play with it to really have a good look!! It’s like a lot of things on the net, unless you have a play, you will miss out on most of the good features.
Go and have a look at my bookmarks
What you will hopefully see is a list of my most recent bookmarks. You will read the title, which will be in larger font and will be a hyperlink. Click on it if you want to see it… Underneath that there may or may not be a comment and underneath that, the “tags” that I have used to classify the link and a figure of how many other people have marked it too! (Oh, and the date)
Down on the right hand side you will see a (very) long list of all the tags that I use. You can click on any of these to see all of the links I have put that tag on to. Try it, click “computer”…
You will see that the link has taken you to http://del.icio.us/wynter/computer, I’m sure you can see the pattern. But wait, there is more! You will notice that there is now a second column of links to the left of the other one. These are the “related tags” and that means that these are all the tags that I have used ALONG WITH “computer”. If you click on one of them (don’t at this point) you will go to that list of links. But the better trick is to click on the plus-sign next to the tag. Try it, click on the one next to “esperance”.
You should now be at http://del.icio.us/wynter/computer+esperance – get it? These link(s) (there is only one at this stage – the google group home page) are all the ones that I have tagged with both “computer” and “esperance”.
Two quick tips before I go:
1. replace my user name (wynter) with the word “tag” to see all (ie everyone’s) links with those tags, eg http://del.icio.us/tag/computer+esperance – this shows the same stuff at the moment, but if any of you were to decide to bookmark any pages that might be of interest to the “Esperance+Computer” Club might be interested in, then they would show up here!
2. Do you understand RSS? If not, ignore this bit. If you do, have a look at the link that is under the orange icon with RSS on it. Copy the link and put it in your newsreader or whatever you use (I use one or both of Firefox and Thunderbird, depending on the type of link). Now, whenever a new link is posted, it will show up in your reader, a bit like an email….
OK, this was a long post, but I suggest you sign up (no email required, but necessary if you ever want to recover your password) and have a play. Make sure you read the help section but be warned, this is not all that easy to get your head around straight away.
Go and enjoy your delicious meal.
