i know that everyone has different ways to keep track of their 'to be read' lists 'read' lists and 'rec' lists. it can get confusing and overwhelming. well my awesome friend kassiah told me about delicious a couple months ago and i love it! she even did a tutorial for her author's blog on edwardville and gave me permission to post it here. i hope you guys enjoy :)
An Author Blog
By:
I've agonized for days over what to write for the members of this fine community. I first thought of expressing my total support of teams for The Fandom Gives Back but figured you've heard more than enough about that from me. What I really wanted to do was share with you how to do something, a tutorial if you will. I was totally prepared to give you a basic blogger tutorial, including how to set up your own blog with a custom template and other shiz like that. But then I thought..."what if you don't want to set up your own blog?"
It's a valid question. If you really wanted to know how to do it, you would have asked me already, right? So, I racked my brain, trying to think of something that I know a little about that could make your life better by being slightly helpful in some small way. Then, I figured it out: Bookmarks.
Wait! Wait. I can hear the collective groaning all across Edwardville right now. Why bookmarks? Because we all use them, in some form or another. Whether you use bookmarks to keep track of the fics that you read or everything that you want to remember, they come in handy. I'm going to show you a couple of things that you might not know about bookmarking and how it can help you stay organized, if that's what you want.
First, I will let you know how to back up your bookmarks using Firefox. This is especially useful if you get a new computer or if you start using one of the social bookmarking tools that I'm going to tell you about. If you use Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari, Netscape, or Opera, I've included the links to directions to do this by clicking on the name of your preferred browser.
To save your bookmarks in Firefox:
1. Click Bookmarks on the menu bar and select Organize Bookmarks.... The Library window will open.
2. In the Library window, click the
button and then select Backup.... The Bookmarks backup file name window will appear.3. Select a location to save the backup file. It's a good idea to save this file to an external harddrive or flashdrive in case your computer crashes, or to email it to yourself.
4. Close the Library window.
There. Now you've backed up your bookmarks.
Okay, now let's talk about Social Bookmarking. Why would you want to use this? There are a couple of reasons. One, if your computer crashes or you get a new computer, all of your bookmarks are there--on the intarwebz without having to back them up. Two, they are accessible anywhere you have internet access. Three, you can tag them and organize them in a variety of ways, and perhaps the most important reason, they are easily shared with yo frands.
So, what's the main reason that I use social bookmarks? Back when I was a Calculus teacher, I used this method to share cool links to resources with my class. Now that fic has taken over my life, it has a different purpose for me. I get a lot of requests for fic recs. People don't just ask me to tell them my favorite story. They look for specific types, likeDILFward or high school fic or super hot one-shots. I always look through my hundreds of stories that I have on alert to find the fic that they are looking for. Then I tweet or send the link, for them to have to pull it up, read the summary, and realize that it's not the story they want.
I can also tag them by where I got the rec, so whether I am looking for a fic that I found on a ficdive or one that I found her on E'ville, I can indicate that.
There's another reason that I like this method, and that's because of pressure--I don't deal with it very well. I put absolutely everything on alert, whether it's TBR or I'm reading it, or it's complete and I liked it. Then people think I put their story on alert because I'm reading it, and wonder why is the girl who used to be the review police putting my story on alert but not reviewing? I feel pressure to read it or just...whatever. So, I'm switching everything over to social bookmarks.
There are lots of different social bookmarking sites to choose from:
There are advantages to every one of these, but I like Delicious the best because it's easy to use and easy to share and is pretty straightforward. There are others, of course, including something relatively new from google that looks promising, but I don't have any experience with them.
Disclaimer: I'm sharing my bookmarks with you now, but please know that this list is in no way comprehensive. I hope for it to be in the next two weeks. We are changing up the way everything is tagged on The Fictionators (so you'll be able to search for everything there the same way), and I'm doing them together. You know this is srs bsns, because I don't even have my favorite fic of all time on there.
Okay, ready? First, go to http://delicious.com. You'll need to create an account by clicking on the green Join Now button.
Login using your Yahoo! id (if you have one) or make a new one. If you are planning to share them, I suggest using your penname/screenname. Make your account and then sign in.
If you want to import your bookmarks, click on Settings in the upper right hand corner.
Click on Import/Upload Bookmarks
Choose Easy if you want to import everything you have bookmarked on your computer or Custom if you want to decide what to import. Choose manual if you are importing from a file, like the one you saved earlier.
To save new bookmarks, click on the Save a New Bookmark in the top right hand corner.
Enter the URL and press Next
Then you are at the part that makes this so much more than just bookmarking. You can put whatever you want here and tag it however you want. If it's a fic, I put the summary here. If you are going to share your bookmarks, you could put info about the link here.
For the tags, put whatever you'd categorize this as. For fics, I'm tagging that it's TBR and that I got the rec on Eville for example. Just note that the tags are separated by space, not commas (I think you can set it that way though). Another great thing about saving bookmarks on Delicious is that you can choose to make some of them private, meaning if you share your bookmarks, you are the only one who can see those. All of my crafty-related bookmarks are private because I know most people use mine to find fics--I don't want to weigh them down with my obsession with glitter and rhinestones and ribbon.
After entering all of your info, just click save and voilà! You've saved your first bookmark! You can always go back and edit them or remove tags (or bookmarks). You can bundle tags together and sort them. It's all kinds of win.
I should also tell you right now that I use the Delicious PlugIn for Firefox because that makes it even easier. After downloading the extension, this is how I bookmark:
I highlight the summary of the fic and right-click on the Title. Then I choose "Bookmark this Link in Delicious".
Then add your tags, add any info that you want, choose to make it private, whatever. I put the author in the Title and the tag because that helps me. You can also use symbols, like ♥, to show that you love something. Then click Save.
There you go. It's kind of a tedious process if you have a lot of things to bookmark, but well worth it. There are lots of other great things about bookmarking with Delicious. One of them is subscriptions. You can subscribe to a particular tag. This would be especially great, for example, if members of Edwardville all decided to tag their stories something like EvilleMemberStory and then whenever a new tag gets added, we'd know about it.
You can also see how many times a particular url has been saved in Delicious.
...and when you click on that link, you can see who also bookmarked that link
and what else they liked:
That's it! The only downside I see to using Delicious is that the bookmarks are by date I bookmarked them, rather than update-date. If I could have them move like that, it would be the best of both worlds as far as Delicious vs. FFnAlerts. Other than that, I love that I'll be able to give someone a link to my list of recommended one-shots and they'll be able to see the summaries with one easy perusal.
Thanks to the amazing
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
giselle_lx who gave me the initial idea to use Delicious bookmarking for something other than math. Thanks, Edwardville, for having me, and I hope that I didn't bore your pants off with this author blog. so i hope yall enjoyed this awesome tutorial. if you don't know kassiah, you are missing out on a whole lotta awesomeness. here are some links where you can find her (she's everywhere)