del.icio.us is a “distributed bookmarking” site; by installing a plug-in on your favorite browser (IE and Firefox are supported, along with several others), you can replace (or supplement) the built-in bookmarks (IE calls these “favorites”) facility in your browser with a much more useful one:

• Your bookmarks get stored on del.icio.us’ servers, and local copies are kept synced on your local browser. If you use multiple workstations, you now get to automatically keep your bookmarks synchronized no matter which machine you’re working on. Synchronization happens periodically on its own, and you can force an update as well if you’ve just made a bunch of updates. Even if their servers go down, your browser still keeps a local copy — you’re not dead in the water.

• You can “tag” bookmarks with an arbitrarily long (i.e. as many as you want) list of descriptive tags. I have quite a few related to Willfe.com here, all tagged with “willfe.com.” My bank and PayPal stuff are in a “banking” tag.

On Firefox, at least, you get some extra coolness:

• The bookmarks menu is replaced with a “del.icio.us” menu, with the usual “Add Bookmark” and “Your Bookmarks” options (each behaves differently than the stock menu items, but that’s okay), a link to documentation, a cascaded menu containing all your tags (yes, all of them), and “Manage Favorite Tags”. Beneath that one are cascaded menus for each favorite tag.

• Because of the way menus are structured in this plugin, the first character of each menu entry that doesn’t have a hotkey automatically becomes that item’s hotkey. This means you can use a bit of trickery to really speed things up if you’re a keyboard demon like I am.

I’ve named individual bookmarks with a leading hotkey character, since within each cascaded tag menu the first character of each entry is the hotkey (no “stock” items in any of those menus has a hotkey). On any system I run, I can get straight to the “Willfe.com New Node” page to add a new piece of content (like this one) by pressing: [Alt]-[l] [w] [n]. Three keystrokes and I’m there. Boom. Google AdSense stats? [Alt]-[l] [w] [a]. My bank? [Alt]-[l] [b] [c].

It sounds stupid but it saves me a ton of time. Project bug tracking, home stuff, personal stuff, and all sorts of other stuff, all at my fingertips with a seriously handy website and extension.

Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.
— Phyllis Diller, “Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints”

She’s right. You can’t fuckin’ sleep if you’re pissed off