Using Social Bookmarking Sites For More Than Social Purposes
Recently the hard drive on my laptop died. My laptop locked up so I held the power button in and it turned off as expected. What happened next was very unexpected. I did not get the usual “safe mode” prompt, instead my laptop said the data was corrupt and a full system restore needed to be done. I wasn’t able to save any data on my laptop. As a result I lost alot of data but was able to recover some. The biggest loss was of my bookmarks. I know there are ways to backup bookmarks in Firefox but I had never used them before. I had been using del.icio.us for a while but not as active as I should have been. Now I am an active user on there. I bookmark sites every day and tag them. Why? Not as much to share what I find but as a means of backup. Everything I tag on there is available online from any computer. Even my laptop should it crash again. In Firefox I do not have a bookmark menu anymore I have a “del.icio.us” menu like below:
Now when I click on the menu option and select “My Bookmarks” a new sidebar opens with my bookmarks from del.icio.us. I can also choose to “not share” a site when I am tagging it, making it private for me only. This is useful when tagging or bookmarking development sites or sites I just want to be for my eyes only. In Firefox I also have two new buttons a del.icio.us button and a button marked tag:
Using the above two buttons I can quickly “tag” or bookmark a site and also display my tagged items. The Firefox plugin also replaces the normal bookmark dialog when the same action as clicking the tag button when I press Control-d to bookmark a site.
I like the idea of my bookmarks being stored online and also being able to share them with members of my network. I am yet to explicitly share anything with a specific person as I do not want to be too pushy. I also like the idea of being able to access my bookmarks anywhere I can get online and also having the online backup of my bookmarks just in case my PC takes another dive. Use this link to see what I have tagged at del.icio.us. If you like what I have bookmarked feel free to join my network and we can all share what we find online.
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I did a similar thing but using Flickr. I recently lost a bunch of my pictures from my laptop, but luckily had them all on my Flickr account. From now on, I am making sure to upload them constantly to have a safe backup.
Comment by Justin Wright — August 25, 2008 @ 2:44 pm
Great name Justin! I also use carbonite for backups on my laptop. I recently lost the contents and carbonite downloaded almost 50k files back to my laptop while I was sleeping.
Comment by Justin — August 25, 2008 @ 2:47 pm