While I'm doing my freelance and hobby work, I need to have certain reference materials close at hand. Of course, I've got my various O'Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers books on my bookshelf, but what do I do about those indispensable online resources?
Browser bookmarks, of course, are the answer. But I keep my bookmarks online, and it's a hassle, not to mention at least three clicks and page-loads, to get to the source via the online bookmarking service.
Happily, an answer is at hand using a combination of Del.icio.us tags, RSS, and Firefox Live Bookmarks. Here's what I do:
- Any web page that I want to appear in my online reference shelf, I tag with refshelf.
- I subscribe to the RSS feed for this tag using Firefox.
- To do this, you start on your refshelf tag page
- click on the orange RSS icon in the browser's address bar
- select "Subscribe to your user name's bookmarks tagged 'refshelf'"
- select "Live Bookmarks" from the drop-down list
- and click subscribe.
I chose to put the subscription in my Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, which gives me access to any of the items in two clicks and one page-load:
Of course, being an RSS feed, this list is automatically updated to contain anything I tag with "refshelf" on Del.icio.us.
I originally tried this experiment using Connotea. However, the Connotea RSS feeds don't link directly to the source, but rather to a page on Connotea about your bookmark, which itself links to the source. So I copied my bookmarks across to Del.icio.us for this experiment. I have no-one but myself to blame for this, since it was me who made that particularly stupid design decision, back in a former life...
There is one advantage to using Connotea instead, which is that you can easily get past the restriction on the number of items that are given in an RSS feed by adding a ?num=50 (or whatever) to the RSS feed URL. However, I like to keep my refshelf focused on just the essentials, so I haven't hit the limit yet on Del.icio.us.