I May Be Late To The Table, But This Still Tastes DEL.ICIO.US To Me!
I’ve known about the “social bookmarking” site/app/Web 2.0 darling del.icio.us since it launched, I guess I just didn’t really clue in to it’s awesomeness until today.
OK, so I’m a little slow sometimes.
I am what you may call a voracious reader. I usually have 2-3 books on the go, stacks of magazines that I never throw out (which I’m sure doesn’t annoy my girlfriend at all, right honey?). I can’t take a poop or fall asleep without something to read. The whole “blog revolution” (blogolution? bloggervution? I smell a new buzzword!) has been awesome for a connoisseur of the obscure, inane, insane, wild, wonderful, and OMGWTF such as myself. My brain is Augustus Gloop and the net is my river of chocolate (see, I knew that whole “series of tubes” analogy made sense!).
It was bad enough when I had to hunt and peck around for some nuggets of info, I had enough sites memorized that I knew I enjoyed. Occaisionally they’d link to other cool places that I’d have to remember or bookmark. But then sites like Fark started to gather lots of links together in one place. And then other sites started doing the same thing, on every topic imaginable. RSS feeds came along, and that was like adding a nozzle to the firehose, because at least I could get all the stories and posts and pics and jokes and articles in one place. Bloglines, Google Reader put it all online for me, so now I didn’t have to be at any one computer to go through all my favourite sites and feeds. And they made it so easy to subscribe, I’m now getting a stupid amount of posts, hundreds a day, far more than I could ever keep up with (and still do things like work, sleep, eat)!
The productive life is about efficiencies. I can scroll through a few hundred links, and mark the ones that sound interesting for later reading! For a while it was just in an ever-growing folder of bookmarks on each computer I used… then I clued in on one of the reasons I started this little bloggity-blog all those many years ago, to store and share the cool stuff I find! So a few links here or there, then a big “link dump” every once in a while to clear out the bookmark folders. Not very efficient, but improving. Google Reader added an “Email” link to each post, which allowed me to post the entire article on here, which I thought was really cool, but now I’m stuck with 40 or 50 unpublished articles that I have to go through, clean up, and write some kind of comment about. Yikes. Back into overload again.
So this is what brought me back to looking at del.icio.us. I wanted some place to keep my bookmarks that would allow me to access it from any computer and easily share with anyone who was interested, and if I could keep a bit of an update going on my website here, bonus!
Well, those of you who read this site directly (as opposed to through a RSS feed) should see a new section for “Recent Links” (or whatever I’ve changed it to that day), as well as a link back to my del.icio.us page, where I will be linking to all the various little items of interest I stumble across as I surf the tubes. You can even subscribe to my link feed, and get all those wonderful little links without having to dirty your browser with my digital brain vomit.
The “Links“… um… link… still stays. It’s more of a source list for the individual pages and articles that I’ll tag in del.icio.us. I’m stoked about this, it’s giving me another layer of efficiency that I can use to optimize my time without sacrificing the random knowledge that I’ve been feeding my brain since I got my first Guinness Book of World Records and Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. Of course, I haven’t yet got to the point of taking my laptop into the bathroom with me, so Uncle John still has a place of honour… right beside the throne!
Ubuntu Feisty users: Improve the look of your fonts in 2 minutes flat by installing a few packages. The font change is very noticeable in Firefox and the terminal. If you want to get technical about it, the process detailed in the Ubuntu Forums improves Feisty’s subpixel rendering. After you complete the steps, you will need to restart your open apps in order to see the difference. The 
