KD5NJR - Computer BookMarks

KD5NJR’s HOW-TO #1
What to do with all those bookmarks?
Scott Haley KD5NJR
KD5NJR@gmail.comwww.delicious.com/kd5njr
© copyright 2008.
Revision 0.13 September 2008.25 November 2008.


1. Introduction
There is a lot of information on the Internet (and on a lot of other things too) about amateur radio. Usually to save paper, or save ink, or reduce clutter or for whatever reason we’ll just hit the “bookmark” or “add to favorites” button to save the website address until we really need the information.

But in my experience it doesn’t take long to before you’re swamped in these bookmarks. I have problems with bookmarks.

1) The name of the site isn’t really what you associate the information with.
Example: The address to the page you’ve found about APRS is actually called http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2008/08/29/10282/ … which isn’t very helpful. So you have to edit the name of the bookmark to something else. Not a big deal, but it does take some time.

2) After a while you get more bookmarks collected than you can display on your screen at once. So, you scroll through them and you notice it takes longer and longer to find what you want. You could set up folders for the bookmarks.Example:Bookmarks
Banking
Ham Radio
Model Rockets
But depending on your browser and settings, it can take extra time and mouse clicks to get to a specific bookmark. And I’m not apt to put the bookmark in the right place when I first save it, so I have to periodically do some housecleaning on the computer now and again. When I am really on-top of things I have something that looks like this. Example:
Bookmarks
Banking
Ham Radio
Organizations ARRL
AMSAT
OKDXA
BAARC
Blogs
Soldersmoke

Model Rockets
Which is useful (“sorted” by subject) but cumbersome to navigate as things grow.

3) The bookmarks I have at home are not necessarily the ones I have at work. Or, but another way, they are not on all my computers. So I find myself sending emails to myself entitled “interesting link”. These emails sit around until I have time to cut and paste the address information into the browser and hit “save to bookmarks”.
4) The bookmarks I have are not the bookmarks my friend has. This is a similar situation to the one above.
But, I think I’ve stumbled across a solution for this. You’ll be a Delicious master in a few easy steps.2. Delicious (www.delicious.com)
Delicious is a free website. It’s a searchable collection of bookmarks. Thousands of folks save their bookmarks into it.

STEP 1: Get an account.
Like I said, it’s free. You’ll need to make up a username and password.Tip: Use your amateur callsign. To most folks it’s just a random jumble of letters and numbers, so it probably hasn’t been taken like, for example, OSU_Cowboy has been.

STEP 2: Search for stuff.
Type something into the search window like you would in Google. Ex: amateur radio.Now Google would bring back perhaps millions of results. But Delicious did not. That’s because it only returns websites that were already bookmarked by someone else. So, it it’s not important enough to be bookmarked, its not in Delicious.
STEP 3: Search specifically for stuff.
Let’s say you heard that a Delicious user named KD5NJR found a new website he liked about APRS. (You probably heard this on the Monday Night Net.) Fine. Go to his specific stash of Delicious links. Ex: www.delicious.com/kd5njr
There is a search box. Put APRS in there just like you would on Google. You’ll get a lot fewer results because they’ll be only the websites I like. And only those websites that I said were about APRS. The way I specify the subject on the bookmark is with tags. (more on those in a bit.)


STEP 4: Adding your own links
While logged into Delicious and at your page, (mine, for example is www.delicious.com/kd5njr) you can add your own bookmarks. You can put in the bookmarks you already use to get started. And in the future, when you find something cool, add it to Delicious so others might find it too.The most fields to put information into are:
URL: (the webs address itself, ex: www.arrl.org )
Title: (this might automatically populate)
Description: (I usually leave this blank in the interest of time, but if the Title isn’t descriptive and the URL isn’t memorable either, you might fill this in. Just enough to jog your memory )
Tags: Tags are what makes Delicious so smart. Typically some tags for you to add are provided by Delicious. Pick the ones that you think are most applicable. For our example website http://www.arrl.org/news/features/2008/08/29/10282/
I’d pick the tags: ham amateur radio packet APRS OpenAPRS.

STEP 5: Making Step 4 easier…
For Firefox (and probably other browser) users you can download the Delicious toolbar. It lets you add websites to Delicious right from the interesting website….without going to the Delicious website. It’s faster this way.

STEP 6: Security concerns…
Part of the fun is letting folks see what you think is interesting. The more people that add a website to Delicious, the further up in the list of results the bookmark will appear. Sharing websites makes Delicious better / smarter. But if you have something you don’t want to share you can take care of that by going to ‘edit’ on that bookmark from your Delicious page. Notice the checkbox marked “do not share.”

You can build up a list of Delicious friends and only share with them.

But I share (what I do share) with everyone. There is some stuff I just don’t put on the Internet.

3. Conclusion
So, when I find something neat on the Internet, I do something like this.

a) Find the link on Google or from a friend via email
b) Add the site to Delicious
c) Edit that entry with the important tags.
d) Sometimes I check if other people in Delicious use that site too.
e) Sometimes I see if other people in Delicious are using a similar website instead.
f) Perhaps I tell Stan about it. Ke5lep.blogspot.com

And it’s worked out well.

I have a common set of bookmarks available at work, at home, at a friends house. All I have to do is log in.

I can assign the bookmarks intelligent keyword reminders (those tags) to help my searches… That beats a million folders popping onto the screen when I hit “Bookmarks”. (And tagging also helps other folks’ searches.)

It works so well I’ve accumulated almost 1000 bookmarks in about a year. And that helps when someone asks me something about a digital mode, or the space shuttle or whatever.

Have fun.

73KD5NJR
Scott