I’ve added a new feature for all those who simply can’t get enough of Keywords — a “side blog” or “link blog” of fun, interesting links that I like, but simply don’t have the time or interest in writing a whole long blog post about. You’ll see it over on the right side, just below the “Recent Comments” section. It even has its own RSS feed!
This is done using my del.icio.us account. For those who aren’t familar with del.icio.us, it is a web site that allows you to quickly and easily save bookmarks online. It has a deceptively simple interface, but packs a tremendous amount of power under the hood. Rather than filing your bookmarks away in various folders, you can assign “tags”. Since you can assign multiple tags to a single bookmark it can be filed in many different categories simultaneously. (This seems to be a trend — Gmail files e-mail the same way.) But what really makes del.icio.us special is that you can see other links posted using the same tag, as well as the bookmarks of other people who linked to the same site. This has allowed me to find some very interesting sites I would have missed otherwise. You can even subscribe to specific “tags” as an RSS feed.
What is confusing about the site is that everything is run off the URL. This is a very sensible way of doing things, but if you don’t “get” it immediately you might feel lost. Here is a handy guide:
- http://del.icio.us/ : main page of the site
- http://del.icio.us/kerim : my user page
- http://del.icio.us/kerim/chinese : all my links with the tag “chinese”
- http://del.icio.us/tag/chinese : everybody’s links with the tag “chinese”
- http://del.icio.us/doc/about : site documentation
You get the idea. Once you understand this, it becomes very easy to use the site.
UPDATE: If you plan on including a similar side-bar using del.icio.us, be aware that they require you to cache the file locally so as to avoid overloading their system. I’ve listed some various methods of doing this here. Also, I forgot to include the link to del.icio.us’ own instructions for how to include their content on your website. It is here. The solution I came up with for local caching is this one.
