Follow up on Online Reading

Posted on May 24, 2007 by LJ

Originally published on 14 April 2006

In a previous article I enumerated what I thought would be a better way to handle online reading. To sum it up, I would post the items to my del.ici.ous bookmarks, marked as @Read and then read them later.

This has been an unqualified success.

My previous method moved all of the links for the items into an electronic notebook. From here the thought was I could access them from my computers, then read them. Unfortunately, most of the time the items would languish.

The current method means that I keep everything in separate tabs (thank you, Firefox!), then post each of the tabs to del.ici.ous using an extension. So when I do my blog reading, I open each post of interest in a new tab, then click, type a few keystrokes, and close the window. Total time to process all of my blog reading: less than 5 minutes. Later, when I have some time to read, I open up del.icio.us, navigate to my @Read category and start going from there. When I am done with a link, I either delete it or refile it.

In the month that I have been using the new method, I have managed to keep up with my online reading. I’m not cluttering up my PDA or computer with links I never get back to, and I can easily modify my @Read bookmarks into another category if I decide the article is worth filing as reference material.

As a side note, I keep all of my reference bookmarks on my PDA in a database, which in turn generates an HTML page I keep on my home site. I have now programmed a function to process in my del.ici.ous bookmarks, which will update both my PDA and home site, as well as export from my home site to del.ici.ous. Everything is in sync, and I’m loving not having to type in links!

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