How To Backup Social Bookmarks: Del.icio.us Gets Foxy

Foxylicious is a free Mozilla Firefox extension developed by Dietrich Ayala that integrates your del.icio.us bookmarks into your Firefox browser's bookmarks.

In doing so, it dispels a worry that many may have in using online bookmark managers - that due to connectivity problems they may not be able to gain access to the site which stores their bookmarks, or that, since they do not have any control over the site, the bookmarks may simply disappear. For those people who have invested a great deal of time and effort in building up their bookmarks, this would be a disaster.

Social bookmarking applications, such as del.icio.us, Furl and Spurl, provide online researchers and writers with three outstandingly useful tools, namely the ability:

1. Quickly and effortlessly to keep an ongoing record of websites you come across and that you'd like to return to later.

2. To label or 'tag' each bookmark, so that you can easily manage and organize them.

3. To allow others to subscribe to a live feed of your bookmarks (via RSS), so that every time you find and bookmark an interesting new website, others who have the same interests as you will be alerted and provided with the appropriate link. You, of course, also have the ability to subscribe to feeds of others' finds.

With Foxylicious, you're able to keep a local copy of all the online bookmarks you have in del.icio.us - all neatly grouped into the tags or categories you originally gave them.

Simply download the extension, install it, restart Firefox and then click on the Foxylicious extension. It prompts you for your del.icio.us user name and password, which you enter and Foxylicious instantaneously creates a new folder in the Firefox bookmark manager, called 'del.icio.us'.

Click on the folder and, if you have used tags to categorize your bookmarks in del.icio.us, you'll see all those tag words are now sub-folders, each one containing the appropriate bookmark and URL.

If you haven't tagged any of your bookmarks previously, then they will all sit in the main 'del.icio.us' folder.

Whenever you are using del.icio.us and add a new bookmark, Foxylicious updates your folders accordingly.

Very neat.