For the past few months, I’ve become increasingly fond of del.icio.us. Plugged into any half-decent RSS reader (liferea being my RSS-reader of choice), it becomes an invaluable tool to help me stay on top of my game, exposing me to tools and advice I probably wouldn’t normally have stumbled upon.

But until recently, I never saw the point of signing up for an account. To me, it was a link exchange - whoop-di-doo. I don’t really have enough to contribute to something like this, I don’t tend to come across things by chance that other people would find interesting. Finally, in the depths of last night, I realised its true purpose and how I could help make it better whilst simultaneously scratching many of my own personal itches.

When I browse around on the internet at home, there’s a lot of stuff that I just don’t have time to check out on anything but a ‘high’ level. I’m generally up until 1am, winding down by chewing email for a while and seeing what’s happening in the world, but it’s absolutely impossible for me to keep my concentration levels high for some of the things I come across. For instance, last night I came across a link that explains the Ten Mistakes Writers Don’t See (But Can Easily Fix When They Do), but it being almost 1am, I couldn’t really digest the information. Since it’s nigh-on impossible (or at least, a whole bunch of work) to synchronise my bookmarks list at home with my workstation in the office, I began the process of emailing the URL to myself, to check it when I got into work today.

I stopped before hitting the “send” button as it finally dawned on me. I realised that I was completely ignoring the fact that I’d just gotten this link from del.icio.us - it would always be there. If only some bright spark could come up with a way for me to keep a track of all the stuff I liked on del.icio.us – one giant all-encompassing bookmark – where I wouldn’t need to maintain a file on a number of seperate machines.

But wait! Some bright spark already set this up! If I set up my own del.icio.us account, I could add the link to it, and have it available no matter where it was. I’m almost certainly pointing out the obvious to some of you here, but to me, it was like someone had finally removed the forest and I was able to say “Oh, there are the trees”.

This also has a number of other knock-on effects. Now, when I want to show someone something cool I’d seen that they might be interested, I don’t have to go digging through all the various machines I use, I can just point them at my del.icio.us account.

It also has the added advantage of making my bookmarks infinitely sortable. In Firefox, I have a “useful stuff” folder, where I dump, well.. useful stuff. This is to stop me getting confused “hmm.. where is that useful linux drum sequencer program I found? Is it in ’linux’ or ‘music’?”. Now I can have it appear in a filter for ‘useful’, ’linux’ and ‘sound’.

Like I said, this might all just sound like the most obvious thing in the world to you all, but I’m glad I finally caught up.