Using RSS Bookmarks with Delicious

I like RSS; I use it extensively to track intersting blogs, product releases, and now podcasts all using Thunderbird’s RSS feed manager. It quickly became obvious to me that an email client really is the perfect match for RSS feeds, since the content so closely resembles an email message to begin with. I therefore couldn’t come up with any good reason to use Firefox’s RSS-powered “live bookmarks.” That is, until now.

Like most of us, I suppose, I run into a lot of web content that seems really interesting, but I often don’t care to read it at the moment. Perhaps I’m looking for something else, or perhaps it explains how to do something that I’m not working on right now. So that’s what bookmarks are for, right? That may be, but it hasn’t worked too well for me. I’ve been disappointed with my bookmark setup for a few crucial reasons.

The first is portability. I use at least 3 computers regularly, and what I bookmark here I want to be available anywhere. Using a bookmark service like Delicious solves that problem; but it also introduces my other problem: ease-of-use. Delicious is, in fact, about as easy to use as they could possibly make the site. But I want something that no website can offer; I don’t want to have to go to their website. I want complete browser integration, like my bookmarks toolbar. I decided that the only solution was to write an extension to integrate Delicious bookmarks directly into Firefox. Then I observed–quite correctly–that I was far too lazy to do that. And then, and this is the cool part, I realized that Delicious and Firefox developers had already done the hard work; I just have to “turn on” the existing capability.

So, there’s the background; here’s the solution. This solution only works with Firefox, not Internet Explorer. It almost works with the new IE version 7, but Microsoft unfortunately left out some very critical pieces in their implementation.

Delicious will serve up your bookmarks either on their website, or in handy RSS form. This works very well with Firefox’s RSS bookmark feture, allowing you to put a “Folder” of Delicious-served bookmarks right into your normal bookmarks collection, anywhere you might otherwise display your own browser-served bookmarks. That includes my old friend, the bookmarks toobar. So, here’s what you do.

Go to your Delicious account (or Delirious — same exact concept, but open-source), select a tag you want to add as a bookmark folder. (Did I explain that these “bookmark folders” are actually the tags you already use? Well, they are.) Now, do you see the little orange RSS icon in the address bar? It looks like this: . Click it.

When you click you get a drop-down list of RSS feeds to use. You want the feed of bookmarks, not the feed of tags. It will then ask you where to put the “live bookmark” and what to call it. You can pick whatever you want, but I’d suggest calling it something short (like the name of the tag) and creating it in the bookmarks toolbar folder. Go ahead and repeat that process of all the other tags you want quick access to. What you end up with is something that looks quite a bit like this:

Of course, there’s no rule that says you can only use your bookmarks. It works just as well with anybody’s bookmark collection. If you want to, you can create a normal bookmark folder (even on the bookmarks toolbar) and put any or all of your “live” bookmarks folders inside it. If you have a lot of computers to do this on, you can get one set up and then copy your “bookmarks.html” file to the others. If you want to do that but you have no idea what I’m talking about, contact me and I’ll walk you through it.

Finally, you’ll need an easy way to add bookmarks to Delicious. You may already know about this, but Firefox supports javascript bookmarks that actually do something. Delicious has taken advantage of this fact and created a bookmark you can add to your toolbar that adds the site you’re looking at to your bookmarks collection. Go to http://del.icio.us/help/ffbuttons to get instructions for installing the bookmark buttons.

One limitation that I haven’t addressed yet is that each live bookmark collection only uses a single Delicious tag. This means that you may want to have a few tags that you use specifically for classifying bookmarks in your browser’s collection. Since Delicious lets you specify any number of tags for a given entry, that’s not a problem. Also, the other RSS feed that we didn’t use, the feed of tags, is one that lists your Delicious tags rather than bookmark entries. This drops you off on the tag’s Delicious page. This may be useful to you if you use a LOT of tags, of you want to link to someone else’s tags collection. Another limitation is the number of bookmarks it will display under one tag. On my browser, it will display the top 31 and clip the rest–the others just don’t fit on the screen. If you have more than that, perhaps you’ll want to consider a more fine-grain classification system. There is no limit (that I’ve seen) on the number of RSS bookmark folders you can create, so go ahead and create as many as you deem necessary.

I hope these ideas help you make better use of your bookmarks collection. If you’re part of that unwashed 90% who still use IE instead of Firefox, perhaps this will give you one more reason to upgrade to Firefox. Give it a try and you probably won’t go back.