del.icio.us

I’d heard of del.icio.us before, but I’d not looked into it. It wasn’t until another writer recommended the service for keeping track of websites used in research that I decided to give it a whirl.

I’m a research website junkie. For real.

My 2.16 GHz MacBook frequently starts complaining about the huge number of websites I’ll have open at any given time. When I do decide to give it a rest and shut down Firefox, I’ve learned not to be surprised by dialog boxes asking if I really want to close the 83 tabs I have open.

It’s nuts.

I do a lot of research, whether I’m working on an assigned story, digging up facts and figures for a lead or pursuing topics of more personal interest (like a recent search for a decent shrimp and grits recipe that didn’t use cream). Add that to keeping an eye on what’s going on in the world and checking in on professional online forums, and I’ve soon got dozens of websites on my desktop at once.

To reduce the processor load, I had been copying and pasting URLs into blank e-mail windows from time to time, then putting a date and occasionally even an umbrella topic (assuming all the links were related to one another) in the subject field. That helped me save the URLs I wanted to visit later without junking up my bookmarks folder — which, frankly, I never use anyway — but then I ended up with dozens of this URL lists in my Apple Mail Drafts folder.

So I’ve been giving del.icio.us a try this morning, and so far, I like it. If there’s a URL I want to save, I can tag it however I’d like — for instance, assigning "seo," "writing," "blog" and "tips" to a blog entry by Michelle Rafter on "What Freelance Writers Should Know About SEO" — et voila! The URL and my tags are saved to my online del.icio.us account for easy access. No more hogging up my processor memory with vast armies of Firefox tabs. No more (relatively) inefficient URL lists in e-mail drafts.

Excellent! This should be a big help moving forward, in minimizing the number of tabs I have open at any given time and in organizing and keeping track of sites I’d like to revisit for specific purposes.

Of course, now I’m realizing I should go back through my lists of links in those draft messages…. Ugh. Some of them date back nearly four years!

I also finally installed Google Analytics this morning. We’ll see if that ends up proving useful.