Everyone Should be Using Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a great online resource with a catchy name. Del.icio.us is an online, taggable, social bookmark manager. This means basically you can bookmark a page in del.icio.us, and then get to it from any other computer later on.

Lets say that you were researching a school paper and you were doing it both at home and at school. Well, instead of emailing yourself all the links back and forth (which would be very painful to do with anything but gmail), you just add them to your del.icio.us account and your done. When you switch computers, you just log into del.icio.us and they are all there.

Better still, you can “tag” each link and provide a description so you can find it later. Tags are keywords that you group content under. They are similar to folders, except an object could have several tags, but could only be in one folder. So, you could tag each link you find with “school”, “paper”, and then the specific topic you are looking at. Then when you wanted to find them again they would all be under the proper tags. Excellent!

Even better still, del.icio.us is a social system, meaning you share your bookmarks with others and can see other peoples bookmarks. This is particularly nice, as you can search for similar tags from other people. For example, the science tag will give you links to such sites as the Nobel Prize Internet Archive .
My favorite tags: website, apple, css, security, and freebsd.
Check out my del.icio.us account here

And if you want to see whats cool on the Internet at this very moment, then check out the popular section. Its delicious.

Everyone should read “A List Apart”

If I had just an inkling of talent for it, all I would want to do with the rest of my life is design websites. Of course I am currently working towards more practical and better suited careers for myself. However, website design is just something that is inexplicably fascinating to me, and if was good at it, I would make a career out of it.

Regardless of artistic talent, we can all aspire to be website snobs. Being a website snob takes very little talent, and just a little background reading about how websites should look and act. A List Apart is where I go to learn about proper website design. It is a beautiful resource filled with articles written by website designers for website designers. Read a few of these essays, and you’ll start to understand the infinite complexity of website design, or at least how picky some people can be.

And then try out your website snobbery: when you see a site written in all flash, scoff at it and then point and laugh with others around you. When a site is using tables instead of CSS exclaim “How crude!” to whomever is nearest to you. Soon everyone will know you are an expert website critic.

Maybe that’s what I’ll become someday, a website critic. They have movie/food/music critics, why not website critics?
I’ll get my own column in the Lawrence.com paper. And they’ll increase my bandwidth limit too, so I can review more sites… A perfect plan!