Now that’s some del.icio.us stuff…

Posted by Neil Crosby on November 30, 2004 10:53 PM

I’ve written about del.icio.us various times before, but I feel it’s worth yet another plug - it really is a great site. I now have it as one of the pages that opens up when I open up Mozilla (yes, I’m still using Mozilla as my main browser, not Firefox), and I tend to refresh it many times during the day to see what new and interesting things people are linking to. Since I found the site, the focus of the sites has shifted somewhat, but this is to be expected as the user base grew. Where the majority of sites used to be technical in nature, there’s now a much larger variety of links to browse when you haven’t got much else to do. Truly the age of surfing has returned!

“How to” pages seem to be abundant right now, with links to pages such as the classic “How To Ask Questions The Smart Way” by Eric S. Raymond. This text basically explains how you should go about asking questions in technical forums, and how not to annoy the very people who will hopefully be helping you. Everyone should read this - it’s that useful. Another great “how to” is Joel Spolsky’s “12 Steps to Better Code” for those of you out there who write software. These twelve steps are mostly pretty obvious but, as Joel says, most companies are generally only running 2 or 3 of the steps at any one time. Running more, or all, will certainly increase productivity.

Less a “How to” and more a useful aid for when things go wrong, the “Default Password List” is a godsend for those times when you manage to do a full factory reset on a piece of equipment, leaving you with a fancy box with flashing lights that you just can’t do anything with. In fact, it was for me last weekend, when I got myself locked out of my router back at home. Of course, such a list being in the wild is even more of an incentive for you to go change away from those default passwords that you haven’t got around to changing, isn’t it? Go on, do it now - I won’t tell anyone that you hadn’t before.

The final useful site that I found via del.icio.us is one that helps with the detection of online plagiarism - copyscape.com. Simply, you tell copyscape the URL of a page that you’d like checking, and it does a web search for you for pages which contain similar text. Whilst this is useful for detecting plagiarism, it has the secondary benefit that it will also detect places where people are referencing your work. Which is nice.

So, yes. del.icio.us is a very useful little site. Go and use it - it’s free, it can help you organise your own bookmarks much more effectively than you’ll generally be able to do using a web browser, and you will find links to very useful and very interesting websites. What’s not to like?

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