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Currently Reading: Grey by Jon Armstrong
Organization is not my natural inclination. I need help to keep on track. Paper and pencil work as well as digital tools. For the next big project, I'm going to try out several different approaches to see if there is a better, easier way that fits my style of writing.
First, better bookmarking. As I do research online, there will be many sites that I want to return to, double check, and review for updates. I could keep them in a working document in Word with all my notes, but that isn't very convenient.
The folders in the browser toolbar are hierarchical, can be arranged to my liking, probably searchable (not sure; I assume there's a widget of some sort for Firefox), and in a word, functional. Once I get beyond two folders depth, it's not as convenient, more difficult to keep the mouse pointer on track, and less helpful.
Del.icio.us is a popular tool, organizes links by tags instead of folders, and presents a different view (the tag cloud). There is a social networking component, which seems less relevant to my purpose. I'm giving it a whirl here. We'll see how it goes.
Anyone use Del.icio.us? Helpful or not for organizing bookmarks? Tricks to finding what you want? Anyone use another method to organize bookmarks?
posted by Todd Wheeler at 4/16/2007 05:21:00 PM
6 Comments:
Nope. I've got piles of bookmarks, scattered here and there and repeated and duplicated and lost. It's as bad as if they were all written on scraps of paper and stuffed into my bathrobe pockets, which is supposedly the way Raymond Carver worked.
He must have had a lot of pockets, or just very deep ones.
My concern is del.icio.us will become like scraps of paper. I'll throw links there and then forget why I wanted them, or forget I saved the link to begin with. We'll see. Open mind; try something new.
Here's how I do mine, just using Favorites on IE:
Each novel has it's own folder, with research links specific to that novel inside.
General research sites have their own folder, so inside that is baby name sites, crime library, howstuffworks, wikipedia, etc.
I keep all the blogs I read in another folder, links to writing groups in another, I have one for sites with good info on computer problems labeled "Geek Stuff", a folder for non-fiction guidelines, one for fiction, one for contests, and then of course there's my financial folder with links to my CC's and bank and the IRS, and my Local Resources folder which has links to my local paper, the library, the sherrif's dept and Pizza Hut.
Oh, and the one labeled "Dream Homes", where I put the links to the houses I'll buy when I win the lottery.
It took a while to set it up, since I had about 200 links saved before I thought to organize it, but now it's easy to just slide a new link into the proper folder. Occassionally I do some housekeeping, too, and toss out links I don't need anymore.
Heh, I like how Pizza Hut is as important as the Sherrif's office (at least in this list).
Good tips on organizing. I think I need to de-thatch my bookmark list.
I use and love and even adore del.icio.us. It's handy to be able to find my bookmarks on any one of the six computers I use on a semi-regular basis, but the real awesomeness came in when I started sharing/poaching links from friends. And the subscription feature is great--I subscribe to the writing tag and find all kinds of amazing things regularly.
Merrie, I like how you've organized your tags. I couldn't quite figure out how del.icio.us bundling worked, and seeing how your links were set up was very helpful.
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