delicious tip of the day
In keeping with my apparent schedule of one post per month, here’s one for this month.
There’s not a whole lot of documentation on del.iciou.us about how to use the site or what all you can do with it (not that it needs much… the interface is simple enough to use). Yes, there is some API documentation, but I can’t find any user documentation anywhere. This may or may not be covered in the mailing list archives, I don’t know. I just stumbled upon it myself.
del.iciou.us is a great service if you haven’t discovered it already. For those that haven’t, you might think it’s some sort of free-form Metafilter. But it’s not. It’s a permalink warehouse basically. And it’s totally open. Create an account, post links. You can optionally associate your links with a set of tags. And the tags are what make del.iciou.us so incredibly useful.
A tag is simply a way to associate the link with a name. That name can be anything. On del.icio.us, they are typically short, lowercase words. It might be a category that means something to you. It might be the name of a person (although tag names cannot have a space in them, so you’ll have to ProperCase that or something).
del.icio.us lets you see all the links posted by everyone. In fact, there is no way to post private links right now. Those links pile up pretty quick and they cover all kinds of subjects. If you want to view the links associated with a particular tag, like “design”, you can use a address like this:
Listing the links that I (or you, if you substitute your username for mine) have posted to the “design” tag is easy too:
http://del.icio.us/bschoate/design
That’s pretty powerful by itself. But what if you are just interested in the links that cover CSS design. You could look for the “css” tag:
Okay… still a lot of links. What about the ones that list both “css” and “design”? Well, you can do that too!
http://del.icio.us/tag/css+design
The “+” symbol in a address there becomes a space. Since a space can’t be used in a tag, it makes for a good delimiter. I tried that syntax on a whim and it works beautifully.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to request links with “css” OR “design”. I would hope that will be added too eventually. Perhaps like this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/css,design
or
http://del.icio.us/tag/css;design
And who knows? Maybe you can exclude tags eventually…
http://del.icio.us/tag/design+-interior
or perhaps like this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/design+!interior
Meaning, list all links with the tag “design” but not with the tag “interior”.
While I’m wishing, I wish DIU supported quoted tags that allowed a space. That would let me associate proper first and last names of people with links. I suppose I could do it with a hyphen instead or just mash the names together, but I’d rather not. Flickr lets you tag images with spaces in the tag name since they support quoted tags.
After writing this whole thing up, I noticed that when you view a particular user’s tags, you get a list of “related” tags that you can add to the existing view to further filter the list. This reveals the use of the “+” operator, but they don’t list those related tags when viewing them at the global level. So just tweak the URL yourself if you want to filter those tags.
