Hello again travellers,

The second tool I’d like to recommend that everyone should use is Delicious.

Delicious is a free social bookmarking tool. It allows you to store your bookmarks online, tag them and share them with your friends. This is very useful for people who use different computers. I now have the same bookmarks at work as I do at home on my laptop and desktop. Or even if I was at your home, I could access the same bookmarks.

Delicious works with all the popular web browsers and will allow you to import your current bookmarks to help you get started. Delicious itself works as a collapsible sidebar which allows you to quickly search for whatever you are looking for. You can see a short tutorial on using the Firefox or IE plugin on their site.

Delicious completely changes the way you see bookmarks as it stores them in tags, rather then the traditional hierarchical style. This means rather than making a folder to store a bookmark with similar items, you just add a few keywords that describe what you are bookmarking. This changes your behaviour towards bookmarking as it means you can easily bookmark things without having to worry about re-organizing your hierarchically organized bookmarks.

The intuitiveness of the Delicious style of bookmark has led me to bookmark around 4 pages a day. Previously I wouldn’t bookmark things that weren’t that important. If you get into the habit of bookmarking interesting things you will soon find that you are able to quickly reference sites you would have to google for otherwise.

The other attraction of Delicious is the social aspect. You can add your colleagues/friends and it will create a page where you can follow what your friends are bookmarking as well. I have this integrated into Google Reader to allow me to get a feed of what they are up to. This does however lead to some odd conversations when they try to tell you about something they’ve seen and you’ve already read it!

If you decide to join Delicious then you can follow me, my username is tehjoejag.

Hello beloved readers,

I happen to work in an environment teeming with geekdom. This means whenever any tool for any language comes out, I then have to hear about it from a convert the same day. There’s 2 online tools I think everyone should use to keep their online lives sane.

The first of these, is Google Reader.

I used to open loads of tabs in firefox and read different news sites. Sometimes I get referred to an interesting site but then never return. This is where Google Reader fits in. All your favourite sites have an rss feed (see my big button at the top right, or in the location bar next to this sites address).

I implore you to sign up for Google Reader and add your favourite sites. It means you can browse efficiently. I can open google reader alone and never leave it. I don’t need to get news from anywhere else. This also means all those sites you used to visit, or are only updated every so often (see me) you can visit every day without leaving a single tab. Cnet has a good introduction.

Google Reader also has a social aspect, so I share stories with my work colleagues and I share them with you via my sidebar.

So please go and give it a try (it’s free!) and add me. My google username is tehjoejag.

Happy reading!

P.S. Yes Steve M, I know you were using a similar tool back during the Msc!