Shanghai Tech WriterTechnical Writing, Technology, Web2.0, Google, Shanghai, China

In this day and age of information overload, especially working as a technical writer, it is very important that I am able to access/find resources quickly. Between the plethora of internal websites and miscellaneous web resources that I access frequently (and infrequently), both at work and at home, I needed a better bookmark organizational system than what’s packaged with IE and Firefox. I needed something that bookmarks websites easily, searches/recalls these sites quickly, and is portable/accessible wherever I go.

But first, here are my top 3 reasons why the current favorites/bookmarks feature on IE and Firefox sucks.

1. Lack of portability—Websites bookmarked on one computer are not accessible on a different computer. If your computer hard drive dies and you didn’t backup your bookmarks, they are lost forever.
2. Poor/Limited organizational structure—Like Windows folder structure, each bookmark can be saved in only one folder (or no folder) at a time. If you have a folder named “Reference,” another folder named “Useful,” and another folder named “Web 2.0,” you won’t remember where you saved Wikipedia, unless you save it three times, one in each folder!
3. Hard to search—The more bookmarks are saved, the more difficult searching becomes. Most of the people I know save their bookmarks in the default folder, which is no folder at all! When they click on the Favorites or Bookmarks menu on their browser, they see this super long list of bookmarks which aren’t even in alphabetical order. Even if these bookmarks are saved in folders, they are not any easier to find.

I use Del.icio.us to save all my bookmarks. I can’t say this is the best bookmarking website. I am still looking for a better way to bookmark/organize my websites, but for the time being, Del.icio.us does the job. The tagging feature is probably the most useful because I can add as many tags as I want to a website. When I want to find the website again, all I have to do is search any of the words, keywords, or tags used earlier. This works especially well for websites that aren’t accessed frequently, but are still useful to keep.

Here are some pros and cons of Del.icio.us:

For my desktop configuration, I installed the Del.icio.us add-on for the Firefox browser. This add-on adds two buttons to the Firefox browser—the search and the save/tag button—and makes bookmarking so much easier!

The first button opens a sidebar with all the tags and bookmarks ever saved or used. I can type any words, tags, or keywords, and the results will show up right away.

The second button bookmarks the page I want to save. A pop-up window appears and I can enter whatever information I want—keywords, notes, tags, etc. . . Del.icio.us will also suggest recommended and popular tags used before or by others.

Although I’m not completely satisfied with Del.icio.us, this is definitely one of my favorite and most productive workspace configurations.