Firefox Add-on Protects Saved Web sites

Delicious.com Offers Social Bookmarking

Internet browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome all have a bookmark feature that lets you organize useful Web sites and revisit them quickly. But there is a serious flaw: all those bookmarks you have collected reside on your computer. You might lose your bookmarks if your computer dies, install a new operating system or if a catastrophic event occurs, like a house fire.

Consider saving your bookmarks online: that way, you'll always have access to your favourite sites no matter how much water the fire department pours onto smouldering remains of your burning house.

There are many online bookmarking services, as there are numerous Web browsers. The most popular ones are delicious and Firefox, respectively. By way of example, this tutorial gets you started with delicious, and then shows you how to integrate delicious with Firefox. Other online bookmarks and browsers may work equally well.

Getting Started with Delicious

The first thing you need is a delicious account. When you sign up, you'll create a user name and password. Delicious will then invite you to import your existing bookmarks from your browser.

Now that you're signed up, you can start saving new bookmarks at the delicious Web page. But don't do that, because there's a much easier way.

Use Delicious from the Firefox Browser

The next thing to do is get a delicious "add-on" for your Firefox browser. First, download the add-on, install it and then restart Firefox.

You'll notice some new buttons and a new toolbar on your browser (see photos). When you navigate to a Web site you want to save, click the "tag" button. Type in a description of the site and save. When you want to find the bookmark later, click the "bookmarks" button and a sidebar opens within the Firefox window that displays all your saved bookmarks.

You can also access the tag and bookmark features with shortcut key strokes: CMD+D and CMD+B for Mac users. For Windows use CTRL+D and CTRL+B. You can change how delicious works in Firefox by changing the add-on's preferences in the menu bar, under the "Tools" heading.

Share Your Bookmarks with Others

Now that your bookmarks are online, it's easy to share them with other delicious users who join your network. You can also share your bookmarks by using delicious to generate a snippet of HTML code that can then be put into your Web site or blog.

Once you make the transition to saving your bookmarks online, you'll wonder why you didn't do it earlier.