Thing 12: Delicious and my Picky Palate

After last week's happy experience with Evernote, I was wondering what bookmarking tools might be able to add to my increasingly enhanced web-browsing experience.

I'm terrible for finding interesting links and images, emailing them to myself and then losing them in the slew of renewal requests, important stuff about periodicals and myriad other emails that come to my cam.ac.uk account. So a bookmarking service is precisely what I need, right?

Yup, this is as far as I got. And I have no motivation to
[dii]go any further.

I decided to go a little off-piste and try diigo first, because I vaguely remember hearing something positive about it at the second Teachmeet in March (more about Teachmeets can be found here and here). This was a monumental failure, as the "diigolet" button on the browser toolbar seems to do precisely nothing, and is also fairly aesthetically offensive in comparison with the Lightshot feather and the Evernote elephant. I also could not work out how to even add a first bookmark on the main site, which kept trying to get me to watch a tutorial. If I can't work it out for myself or browse through decent FAQs in my own time, I'm not interested.

A very well-organized, information-rich layout (in my
humble opinion)

So diigo diiwent. Delicious was next up, apparently revived and rebooted after the fairly indifferent reception it received in last year's Cam23 Things programme (comments here and here illustrate the "it's OK but...meh" attitude that seemed to prevail). This was somewhat more successful from the off - I installed the add-on (though I'm still not quite sure why it necessitates three icons on the browser) and added my first bookmark without too much pain. The 'tag' icon add-on is swift and effective, and I like the web-based homepage, which provides a lot of information in a clear, digestible way. However, I dislike the fact that you can't just drag things around to make links appear, and that tags can only consist of one word. And they're really difficult to get rid of in the case of typos!

Delicious, frankly, has left me a little unsatisfied and still waiting for the next course. It seems quite useful, but I'm not sure that it captivates me enough to make regular use of it. It seems good for sharing huge lists of links en masse, as the excellent cpd23 programme has shown to good effect. I can also see its application in libraries for reading lists and the like, though for Classics in particular, so little of our material is online that it seems a little redundant there too.

To really sum up how I feel, I'm going to rely on the ever-insightful Library Wanderer to do the talking for me. A year ago, she expressed largely the same feelings, noting that she'd probably switch the most important stuff over to Evernote, which is what I'd be tempted to do too...I prefer the tag system and the way it can include attachments. The biggest factor is, that Delicious does what it does well. But Evernote does it just as well, with a lot of other features (see here for an extended take on this with beautiful accompanying pictures...)

Cake. Mm.
Photo by Dimitri N

The Delicious cupcake is trumped by the towering Evernote pineapple upside-down cake, with glacé cherries to boot.

Now I need to go and find cake...