Building on my previous post and initial review of the Bluedot socialbookmarking site, as a daily, yet somewhat frustrated del.icio.us user, I figured I'd give it a go and see if Bluedot might trump del.icio.us as my socialbookmarking tool de jour (see previous rants on Yahoo's overlapping tagging and social bookmarking systems and issues with tagging & social bookmarking in general). The jury is still out on this debate, but I'm going to give Bluedot a fair shot, especially seeing some of the interesting features it appears to have in the works.
This post is a cut and paste from my post below (which was becoming a bit bloated), so I decided to extract this out, as it primarily is a review of the del.icio.us Firefox extension and how I am using it instead of my old FF links toolbar.
The setup:
So I start with my reasonably tuned FF2.0 browser that I've dialed in for hyper-productivity whilst navigating the web2.0-blog-o-net-sphere.
About 3 weeks ago, I upgraded my del.icio.us extension to the latest version, and initially wasn't too happy when my highly configured Links toolbar (aka my netOS) disappeared and was replaced with a del.icio.us specific one.
[NOTE: while installing this extension will replace your Links toolbar with a del.icio.us one, you can easily recover your old one by disabling or uninstalling the del.icio.us extension. You can also use what they are now calling the "Classic del.icio.us" extension if you want to still tag using del.icio.us, but also want to keep your Links toolbar.
After reading through the del.icio.us doc for the FF extension, in a relatively short period of time I was able to re-tune my del.icio.us toolbar to allow me to use it in a similar manner as I had previously used my tweaked out Links toolbar.
For me, the most important tag is my start tag, which allows me in one click to open all the sites I typically like to start my FF session with in a single click. I've added the Start tag as my first tag that appears on my del.icio.us tags toolbar.
Here's a screenshot of my previously dialed in Links toolbar:
versus my new del.icio.us tag-based toolbar:
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the new del.icio.us bookmarks functionality, but I have run into the following minor annoyances:
- If you customize (or have previously customized) your FF toolbars (e.g. add extra buttons, rearrange things, etc) and you disable or uninstall the del.icio.us extension, all your custom buttons get reset.
- If you only use FF Links toolbar to organize your FF bookmarks, they will not be imported into the firefox:toolbar tab. I think this is a bug. I can't seem to track down all the links from my old FF Links toolbar.
- Every so often, Firefox will initiate a Bookmarks Sync process that freezes up FF and I'm not able to access other tabs or perform other functions (like type this post).
Okay, enough del.icio.us talk for now.
[UPDATE: I've gone back to using the del.icio.us toolbar instead of my dialed in FF Links toolbar. Still a work in progress, but I see the light and have some new ideas on how to kick it up another notch. sTay tuned. ]
