Bookmarking

When surfing the Internet, everyone reaches a pages that they want to save. That is the basic principal of bookmarking, but the standard practice of bookmarking has been completely revolutionized in the past few years. Today, there are many ways to keep track of your bookmarks and even share them with others.

Basic Bookmarking
When you visit a page you want the browser to remember, you can go to the Bookmarks menu (Alt+B) and click Bookmark this page. This is the standard method. Bookmarks can be organized into folders using this method. Alternatively, you can drag the icon of the webpage (on the left of the address bar) to your bookmarks menu or to the bookmarks toolbar (right-click on File and check Bookmarks toolbar if the toolbar is not visible). This form of bookmarking merely saves pages into the browser on this computer only.

Delicious: Bookmarking
However, what if, using a method as easy as this one, you can save your bookmarks to the web so that you could access them from any computer. Then, you have stepped into the realm of social bookmarking, a popular new trend. The current leader of this trend is del.icio.us. With Del.icio.us you get two buttons added to firefox. One for viewing all your saved bookmarks and another (TAG) for adding new ones. To bookmark a page click Tag and chooses a category (optional but recommended). You also get a new menu to the right of Help for more del.icio.us options. Some websites like this one put del.icio.us links after posts. Clicking these links will also bookmark the page.

Delicious: Creating an Account
The directions to create an account at del.icio.us are explained clearly. Go here to sign up.
After creating an account, you will have installed an extension into firefox allowing for del.icio.us bookmarking.

Delicious: Importing Firefox Bookmarks
To import your firefox bookmarks login to your del.icio.us account. Click settings (top right of the page). Click import/upload under Bookmarks. Now open the bookmarks menu (Alt+B) and click Organize Bookmarks. A new window should appear. On this new window click File > Export and save your Bookmark file to a place on the hard disk that you will remember. Now close the Organize Bookmarks window. On the del.icio.us import bookmarks page click browse and select the file you just saved. I would recommend checking "No, do not add popular tags" because there are too many popular tags and this disorganizes my bookmarks rather than the other way around. The other options are up to you. When you are ready, click import now and wait. The process should take about 1 minute for every 50 bookmarks you import. If you want to make your bookmarks public (everyone can see them, no login needed) than you have to go through and change all the imported bookmarks to public, one by one, but they work fine privately.