Firefox & the del.icio.us Plugin

15 Jan 2007

I’ve been using the latest del.icio.us plugin for awhile with Firefox 2.x and have been quite impressed.

Although my experiences have been largely positive I did have to start with a new account b/c my previous one suffered from poor tag choices (and del.icio.us didn’t provide much in the way of batch modifications at the time).

If you ask me, the most useful piece of the puzzle is the Del.icio.us button bar in Firefox. At first it seemed like a fairly radical shift from traditional bookmark folders but now it’s second nature.

Basically you map ‘favourite tags‘ (from del.icio.us) that are then selectable from a drop-down. Selecting a tag populates the rest of the button bar with the tagged items. Simple as that. Truth be told, the entire mechanism for bookmarking also changed but I won’t be getting into that here.

For me, I’ve got 3 favourites: *firefox:main, firefox:work, firefox:fun. firefox:main *consists of your typical GMail, Google Reader, Facebook, etc. *firefox:work *contains internal links to JIRA, FishEye, Confluence, etc. and *firefox:fun *is not much more than a direct link to my hockey pool. It’s a simple drag & drop to add a new item to the button bar.

I agree that it’s more or less always been possible to do something like this. If you’re not sold yet perhaps an even bigger benefit to all this is that my links are centrally stored (you don’t store passwords and you have the option to effectively hide a link by making it not shared). The obvious draw for me is being able to change PC’s (or even dual-booting) and having one less thing to worry about synchronizing. Previous to this I was using another Firefox plugin that allowed me to synchronize via SFTP. It worked but wasn’t very seamless and collisions weren’t handled properly.

I’ve been a del.icio.us user for awhile now and have grown to appreciate the power and flexibility it offers. Sure there are alternatives now but it’s simple and offers most everything that I need _right_ now.

As an aside, If I ever manage to get away from using Firefox’s saved session support as a mechanism to take work home with me I’d consider tagging whatever I was in the middle of thus allowing me to start with a clean slate each day.

Anyways. Check it out. I should note that there are some rather negative comments on the Firefox page about the plug-in. Your mileage may vary but I’ve been happy with it.