Sign up for del.icio.us
May 2nd, 2007 by Kevin Wiliarty
Signing up for del.icio.us is pretty straightforward, but to take better advantage of the service you’ll probably also want to customize your browser to a certain extent. When you work on an unfamiliar machine, you won’t necessarily have the luxury of your personal browser customizations, but when you’re working on your own machine you ought not to miss out on the advantages they provide.
- Step one is to go to http://del.icio.us and create an account
- Click on ‘register’ in the upper right
- Fill in the simple web form
- From there, experiences will vary depending on which browser you are using. del.icio.us will guide you through the process of adding ‘buttons’ to your particular browser. The buttons will make it VERY easy for you to bookmark any page you are looking at.
- If you’re using the FireFox browser, you will probably find the del.icio.us Bookmarks Add-on extremely useful.
- Click the “add-on” link above
- Choose “Install Now”
- Allow FireFox to restart
- One of the features of the add-on is that it synchronizes your del.icio.us bookmarks with bookmarks in your local browser. When you launch the add-on for the first time, it will invite you to upload the bookmarks in your browser to del.icio.us. After that, the add-on will sync your links whenever you open the browser.
- Having the links in the browser, too, allows for fast searching. Click Apple+b (on a Mac) or Control+b (on a PC) and you’ll get a quick search side-bar. Apple/Control+d will open the bookmarking dialog. Control+click (Mac) or right-click (PC) when your cursor is hovering over a link will pull up a context menu that will now include an option to bookmark the link in del.icio.us even before you’ve opened it.
- One word of caution about importing bookmarks from your browser into del.icio.us: Some browsers come with large libraries of preset bookmarks that you may never use or even know about. If you import your browser bookmarks indiscriminately into del.icio.us, you may find that your account contains hundreds of bookmarks that you don’t care about.
You might also want to watch a tutorial movie by Kathy Gilroy featured on the blog “Learning 2.0 Tip-of-the-Week”