| Firefox Add-On: Delicious Bookmarks |
| Sunday, April 05 2009 |
|
A couple posts ago I wrote about the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer which keeps your Firefox bookmarks in-sync across multiple machines. But what about all those blog posts, articles, and other pages you stumble across that you don’t want to clutter your bookmarks but you don’t want to lose either? That’s where the Delicious Bookmarks add-on comes into play.
The Delicious Bookmarks add-on is simply an easy way to save a bookmark into your Delicious account (which you need before using the add-on) without having to ever visit the Delicious site itself. There’s a bit of a history lesson with this add-on because it was perfect right up until Yahoo bought Delicious, back when they were named del.icio.us. Once Yahoo took over they mucked with the add-on and put out a version that completely and unnecessarily took over the built-in Firefox bookmark system. Because of this, a “classic” version of the add-on was created to keep true to its original functionality (the “classic” version only works with Firefox versions 1.0 – 2.0).
Fast-forward a little bit and we now have an add-on that does a pretty good job of compromising between the “classic” functionality and the other stuff Yahoo was trying to do. After you install the add-on you’ll notice three shiny new buttons to the left of the Firefox address bar:
 |
Those red numbers don’t appear of course, but here’s what each one does:
Button #1 is the main Delicious button, as it opens a new browser tab and takes you to your Delicious account.
Button #2 is the Delicious bookmarks button, which opens your entire collection of Delicious bookmarks in a pane that appears on the left-side of the browser. This pane has a search bar and is split into tags and bookmarks for those tags. Clicking on a tag in the top part shows the bookmarks with that tag in the bottom part. From there you can click a bookmark and be taken to that page.
Button #3 is the Delicious tag button, which allows you to quickly save and tag a page in your Delicious account. For instance, if I want to save/tag the page where this add-on is found, I’d navigate to that page and click this button. The window below will appear for me to add notes and/or tags, then I click Save and I’m done (click the image for a clearer view):
 |
There are a handful of options for configuring the add-on just how you like it, but the one worth mentioning is the ability to switch to Classic Mode. Running the add-on in Classic Mode removes Button #2 and disables the functionality that comes with it. The add-on even allows you to define some keyboard shortcuts, if you’re so inclined.
 |
 |
 |
So there you go. The Delicious Bookmarks add-on is a handy utility that’s there when you need it and stays out of your way when you don’t. The add-on is currently at version 2.1.018 and can be downloaded and installed from here.
