Using Social Bookmarking Sites For More Than Social Purposes

Posted in Did you know? on May 13th, 2008

Welcome! Thank you for visiting!
Follow me at Twitter
Subscribe to my full feed.

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.

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