googlebookmarks
The transition from del.icio.us to Google Bookmarks
Well, the day has finally arrived. del.icio.us is going away and if you're anything like me, your bookmarking habits have come to a confusing halt. What's next?
I've chosen to give Google Bookmarks a shot. It's no where near as integrated with Chrome or other services as I would have hoped, so I'll be explaining how to create an environment that distracts as little as possible from your normal use while allowing you to save bookmarks as you see fit – as you are used to doing.
I have personally grown quite attached to Firefox's del.icio.us plugin which provided a sidebar for searching through all bookmarks by tag or title. After moving over to Chrome and not having this, I found myself using del.icio.us much less – the worst part is, I watched it happen! I wasn't sure how to best use del.icio.us having moved from a very well integrated plugin to, what I consider to be a poor implementation in Chrome. I had a shortcut to save things, but no shortcut to quickly access my bookmarks.
The first thing to do is to get your bookmarks moved over from del.icio.us to Google Bookmarks. The method I ended up using is a script written by Mihai Parparita which can be found here. This script is pretty powerful, importing my tags (as labels), urls and titles. The only thing it didn't bring over were the dates each bookmark was saved.
Now that we have all of our data in Google Bookmarks, how can we use if effectively. If you're using Firefox, there are a few solutions out there. Otherwise, if you are using Chrome, Safari et al, we're stuck with making our own solution.
The first thing I did was to move things like my Instapaper 'Read Later' and Bit.ly links into a folder called "Save to" on my Bookmarks Bar. I then grabbed the bookmark link:
This can be dragged directly into the new "Save to" folder on the bookmark bar. This can also be found here. Clicking this provides us with a form to save new bookmarks. One down, one to go.
Now, how can we easily access this list? Saving a bookmark to Google Bookmarks is a great start, but we're using Chrome – it's natural to just search for things in the location bar directly! Why this should this be any different? Assuming you're using chrome, we can accomplish this by adding Google Bookmarks to the list of Search Engines. Open Chrome's Preferences window.
Click the "Manage" button on the line that says "Search" followed by a dropdown list. You may be surprised by the number of search engines you have in here. click the + symbol below the list to add a new search engine. We have two options at this point. If you liked searching by tags on del.icio.us, I'll be providing a tag-only search option here. I'll leave that up to you. Add a logical name, likely "Google Bookmarks" (or "Google Bookmarks by Label" if you're planning the tag-only route). The keyword should be simple painfully simple, such as "gb". You will be using the keyword every time you want to search through your bookmarks.
Lastly, the URL you use depends on your chosen method of search. If you want the ability to search through everything (bookmarks names, labels, etc):
If you want to search through labels only:
I personally created one for each using the keywords "gb" an "gbl" respectively. I am a tag fiend, so for me, the latter option was the clear answer.
Once you have this setup, open a new tab, move your cursor into the location bar and type your keyword, then hit tab, then type your desired search criteria. Hitting tab should replace your keyword with the name you gave this search engine. If not, retrace your steps. Essentially "gb[tab]something" should do a search for anything related to the phrase "something" (assuming your keyword was "gb").
I'm eager to see if this satisfies as a del.icio.us replacement. So far, sadly, it seems just as good as del.icio.us' integration into Chrome (I say sadly since I have a feeling that this was the very problem that caused del.icio.us to decline – lack of solid integration). I will be giving this a solid try over the next few weeks. If you give this a shot, let me know on twitter (@slant) how it goes!