Jackie had moved in just as Feb came to a close and turned out to be the best roomate I had ever had. Clean, polite, never home... So of course it came to an early end as she had to move in with her mother to take care of her after a pretty horrible event.

Amanda and I came close to making a decision on each other a number of times throughout the month, each time falling away from it at the end for whatever reason. The month closed with me still alone. Sad days right?

In the waning days of the month what looked like an end to my days at Wal-Mart in the form of a very promissing job opportunity turned out to be bunk as well.

Almost a not so dissapointing month.

Even life at home seemed to be looking more interesting as I prepared to take on a roomate. A female roomate with whom I have a completely platonic relationship. Perhaps I can find two and hilarity can ensue.

This month also saw me using special kung-fu tricks to crush my little girlie hand and finally come to terms with what I'm doing at work. Namely regardless of what I'm doing I can't just sit about like a loaf. That gets boring.

This month I once again started working at Wal-Mart, my own little private hell, where I got the job despite going into the interview with my boxers hanging out of my pants. Good to get me out of the house, bad for the things it does once I'm there. My apartment finally began getting repaired of the damage from Katrina-door, and in other disaster related news I drank my first batch of chock full o' nuts coffee. Mud more than likely tastes considerably better.

Also this month Glynnis introduced me to Four Eyed Monsters, where I had to fight the urge to stalk Susan, and watched the podcasts again and again. I ultimately decided on stalking Glynnis for making me watch it. My new podcasting obsession would grow to include Ask A Ninja and Rocketboom.

A lot of my friends have heard me ranting over it and asked about it so I have decided to put a little ditty on paper about how I use del.icio.us so as to make their lives a little easier should they decide to try it as well.

What is del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. With it you can add sites that you enjoy or find useful to your collection of links, and organize those links by using keywords. This allows you to not only share your bookmarks across multiple browsers and machines, but with other people with similar tastes, interests, or massed amounts of boredom heretofore unbeknownst to the average man

Once you've registered you need add only a bookmarklet to allow you to post links to any sites you want to add. It may take an extra second or two to process but the end results are worth it.

How *I* use del.icio.us

I use Firefox. This, in addition to proving that I am an incredibly wise person, allows me to use extensions such as Foxylicious. Foxylicious allows you to sync your del.icio.us bookmarks with your Firefox bookmarks, thus giving you all the power of your del.icio.us link list right at your fingertips.

First I created a folder in my Bookmarks Toolbar called "del.icio.us". This step was painstaking and had to be redone many times, but once I got past it, the rest was a breeze.

Inside the folder I then created another folder called "Tag List". This is the folder that I assign Foxylicious to sync bookmarks from. Since this is on my bookmarks bar I now have an easy way to go through my list of tags and find the bookmarks I need. Want to find that css tutorial you were reading earlier? Go to the css tag folder then the tutorial folder. Assuming you tag things right it should be there waiting for you.

From there I went on to go to my link list and made a live bookmark for the feed. In Firefox this can be done simply by clicking the little button that pops up in your status bar and then clicking "Subscribe to RSS".

My next step was making links to the two places I am most active on at del.icio.us... My Page, and the popular page. The popular page is a collection of the hottest links at that point in time, and you can find some fantastic things just by reading through it when you're bored. It's just as easy to add other tags in here as well, although I didn't.

After this is where I put the bookmarklets. There are two that I use. The first is del.icio.us linkbacks. It allows you to click the bookmark to open up a new page to see what del.icio.us user have this page in their link list and what tags/descriptions they assigned to it.

You can grab that bookmarklet by dragging [Show Linkbacks] into the del.icio.us folder.

The other bookmarklet I have in that folder is the [Post to del.icio.us] (can be dragged to toolbar) which allows me to post the link to del.icio.us using a form that has all my tags, as well as recommended and popular tags that others have used.

Should you wish to have a quick way of searching del.icio.us tags, you can feel free to try this search plugin. It adds an option firefox's search box to search tags on del.icio.us

How else do I use del.icio.us

If you've been to my links page you may have noticed that I have a del.icio.us section in there. This is basically a list of the last 5 things I linked at del.icio.us, with a link to an expanded list.

For this setup all I am doing is using Magpie to parse the rss and using a small script to display the results. There are tons of different ways of using this on your site, which can be found at the del.icio.us site.

(should you wish to look at how I did it, you can find the php file here. An example of the output is here.)

Example keywords for this article: del.icio.us, howto, tutorial, tools, tips.