rodoula.com

When I first found out about Backpack a few months ago, I was very excited about it, because one of the neat things I can do with it is to place notes in my pages together with links to interesting sites/pages I would wanna go back to, and I could access them wherever I am. That is, in fact what I use it for most of the time. But, I realized just recently that the del.icio.us way of saving ‘bookmarks’ is much more efficient than the Backpack way.

Even though del.icio.us has been around for two years, I only started using it a few days ago, and already I love it. The ease with which it works is just amazing. For those not familiar with del.icio.us, here’s a good description from the del.icio.us website:

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

Once you’ve registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser. When you find a web page you’d like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you’ll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others.

What this description doesn’t tell you is that when you are done adding the bookmark to your del.icio.us links list, you are automatically taken back to the same page you were before! It’s really much quicker and simpler than the following Backpack procedure: copying the web address you want to bookmark, opening a new tab in your browser, going to your Backpack page, then to the particular page you want to place the link in, adding/or editing a note entry, typing in and saving your entry, and finally, returning back to the original window where you copied the address from. Phew!

I also like the tag hints; they make the whole thing even easier, if that’s possible. The fact that I can see what other users have entered for a tag for the same or a similar website helps me pick an appropriate tag name, because sometimes I’m stuck and I can’t think of one that I am happy with.

Having said all this, I’m not about to abandon Backpack. I just won’t use it so much for bookmarking links anymore. I still use it for uploading files, sharing pages with family, friends and co-workers, organizing my projects for easy access, and entering important reminders. Backpack recently upped its file upload and page creation limit, so do give it a try. After you have started building your del.icio.us links library, that is.