Using Delicious

From the del.icious website:

What is del.icio.us? del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. You can use del.icio.us to:

Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes, and more, and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, coworkers, and the del.icio.us community. Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it. So del.icio.us is full of bookmarks about technology, entertainment, useful information, and more. Explore and enjoy. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved -- which is made easy with tags.

What is social bookmarking? del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages.

First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you're at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend's computer.

Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private -- only viewable by you -- if you like.)

Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember -- which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.

What are tags?

Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us. They're a little bit like keywords but non-hierarchical. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.

To get started:

 Using Mozilla Firefox, go to the internet.

 Type in this url: http://del.icio.us/  On the right side of the screen, click “register.”  Type in the required information and click “register” again.

 Once you have registered, it will guide you through “installing buttons.”

Here is some more information about creating bookmarks:

A guide to saving bookmarks

Add bookmarks

The buttons you installed during the registration process are the main way to add new items to del.icio.us. (If you need to install the buttons again for any reason, such as if you're using a different computer, you can go back to step 2 of that process.) When you're visiting a page that you'd like to save to del.icio.us, click the button at the top of your browser labeled TAG or post to del.icio.us (this depends on which kind of button you installed - you probably only installed one of these).

Then, fill out the information in the posting interface and save it -- and you've just saved an item to del.icio.us! To see your saved bookmarks, click the button with the del.icio.us logo or labeled my del.icio.us.

Note: del.icio.us supports buttons for several browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Flock. If you use Camino or Netscape, you can probably use the Firefox buttons. Other browsers, such as the ones supplied by AOL, MSN, and SBC, may be able to use del.icio.us with the posting page (which also works with lynx). There are many unofficial posting extensions for all the popular browsers and for smaller ones like Maxthon and Konqueror; we have a few of these listed on our third party tools page. We also have a few different bookmarklet buttons available.

The posting interface looks like the following screenshot if you're using the Internet Explorer buttons or Firefox extension. If you're using the bookmarklet buttons or posting page, you'll also see a group of your tags under the save button.

The url is the web address of the bookmark that you're saving. This usually starts with http://, and is necessary to save anything in del.icio.us.

The description is the name of the bookmark that you are saving. It is automatically set to the title of the page, if available. You can change this to something more appropriate if you'd like.

Notes are a way to include extended text of what the bookmark is about. This can be text copied from the document, your thoughts, opinions, or anything that you want to include along with the bookmark. It's limited to 255 characters right now. Tags are words that you assign to the bookmark to help you (and other people) find it later. Learn more about tags.

If you'd like to bookmark something for practice, you can save this page. You can also try going to another website (such as Yahoo! or Flickr) and saving that one.

Import bookmarks

If you have bookmarks in your browser that you'd like to upload to del.icio.us, you can use import/upload in your settings to add them to your account. You can upload as many bookmarks files as you like, one at a time. This can be convenient for consolidating bookmarks from multiple computers.

Edit and delete bookmarks

After saving an item, you can edit its description, notes, and tags by going to your bookmarks and visiting the "edit" link next to that bookmark's description. Similarly, if you'd like to delete a item, visit the "delete" link next to its description.

If the inline editing interface doesn't appear to work (for any reason), you may be able to use the link to full screen edit to successfully edit your bookmark instead.

Private and public bookmarks

Bookmarks saved with your buttons are public by default, but imported bookmarks are private by default. If you see "not shared" next to a bookmark, that means it is a private bookmark and only you can see it. Note: if you're logged out, you won't be able to see your private bookmarks either.

To change a private bookmark to public (so that everyone else can see it), click the "share" link next to it.

To change a public bookmark to private, first enable private saving in your settings. Then edit your bookmark, check the do not share box, and save it. While saving a new bookmark, you can also check the do not share box to make that bookmark private.

How do I add “buttons” to another computer?

To add del.icio.us to your Mozilla navigation toolbar, go to this url http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extensionnew and click “Get 1.5 Now.”

Need more help, go to http://del.icio.us/help/

All information contained in these instructions came from http://del.icio.us