Last year shortly after Chrome was released I posted a quick tip on how to make a Delicious “plugin” for Chrome. This was a neccessity, as at that writing Chrome didn’t have a method to migrate the awesome Delicious-Firefox plugin. Well, it’s about 10 months later, and still no plugin support — though some exciting stuff seems just around the corner.

The downside to the bookmarklet method in our last tip is that it doesn’t offer a quick way to search all your bookmarks – tagging and adding bookmarks is essential, but finding them again is sort of the hallmark of a good bookmarking methadology, no?

Thanks to Tip Trick Mod reader MacAnthony here’s an interm solution for quickly searching Delicious bookmarks in Chrome.

1. In Chrome, right-click the browser’s address bar and select “Edit search engines…” (see right)
2. Click the “Add” button and fill in the three fields:
   • Name: ie. Delicious — this is just for organizational purposes.
   • Keyword: ie. delicious — this is the trigger that you’ll type in your address bar to tell Chrome to search your Delicious bookmarks.
   • URL: This should be http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s, where you replace your_delicious_username with, drumroll please, your Delicious username.
3. Click “OK” and then “Close” and give ‘er a whirl.

After you’ve created the new Delicious-Chrome search, try it out by clicking on your address bar and typing “delicious” followed by your search term — upon hitting enter you should be taken to a Delicious page displaying all your bookmarks related to your search.

Speed Tip: Instead of using the rather cumbersome “delicious” as your keyword for the new search engine, put in something shorter — ie the letter “b” for “bookmark”. Now instead of having to type out “delicious [search_term]” to trigger the search, you can simply type “b [search_term]” instead.

Speed Tip #2: To make things even faster for searching, try using some keyboard shortcuts to access the Chrome address bar.

• CTRL-T opens a new tab and highlights the contents of the address bar. As you’ll most likely want to create a new tab for your search results anyway, this is my recommended option.
• CTRL-L / ALT-D / F6 will all bring your cursor up to the address bar and highlight the contents — in case you don’t wish to leave the tab you’re on.

Final Note: I recommend using the Latest Beta Version of Chrome. At the time of writing, it contains a lot of usability fixes that the standard release does not contain, and while these will undoubtedly make their way into the stable release eventually, why wait? Despite its “beta” tag, the beta version in my experience is just as stable as the standard release.

UPDATE: Sept 13/09 – Since publishing this tip it appears Delicious has changed the formatting of their search URL. As such, I’ve updated the URL structure in #2 to the following: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts|your_delicious_username&p=%s

However, with just a tad of javascript you can correct this Chrome shortcoming.

Simply drag the following link to your Google Chrome Bookmarks bar:

Delicious Bookmark

Now, when you want to bookmark a page on Delicious, simply click the bookmark. Easy, huh?

Sadly, unlike Firefox’s plugin, this does nothing to integrate Del.icio.us bookmarks with Google Chrome’s bookmarks, but hopefully a fix for that is not far away.

Tip credit to Ninja Plan.

For example, to see the latest pages saved under the tag “photoshop,” just type in:
http://del.icio.us/tag/photoshop

Similarly, for the most popular of those pages, type:
http://del.icio.us/popular/photoshop

Anyone familiar with delicious bookmarks knows this already of course. But what some of you may not have noticed is the super-way-cool-and-totally-awesome RSS feed at the bottom of every single delicious page:

That means you can subscribe to a feed of pages tagged as “tips” or “movies” or “mitochondria” — whatever turns your crank.

Now, like any RSS feeds, you can use these however you see fit. But I think they work especially well with Twitter and Netvibes.

Share certain Delicious Links through Twitter

I’ve often seen some of my friends send a twitter message that looks something like this:

Reading: TipTrickMod.com – The best thing since chilli-cheese nachos!

Most likely, what’s happening here is they’re running an RSS feed through Twitterfeed.com. It might be a delicious feed, such as the RSS feed for http://del.icio.us/your_name/reading, or possibly even a feed from Google Shared Bookmarks maybe. The point is, you can insert any prefix you wish in front of your bookmarked link to create your Tweet:

Favorited: TipTrickMod.com – The best thing since chilli-cheese nachos!

or even still (though highly unlikely):

This Sucks: TipTrickMod.com – The worst thing since chilli-cheese nachos!

I mean really… Who doesn’t like nachos?

Use Netvibes to Create a Personalized Portal

Netvibes can mash together a collection of RSS feeds from all your favorite websites, so you can create your own personal portal page. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can keep tabs keep up with the very latest news on any given topic watching the delicious feed for that given topic.

So for example, I like to keep up to speed on all things Apple, so I subscribe to the Apple, Leopard, Macbook, and OSX tag feeds. The resulting netvibes page is below:

That page is just a mock-up I did to show you how it looks on the APPLE tab on my netvibes page. Just imagine how much info you can browse and digest if you create 4 or 5 tabs on your netvibes page?

Browsing the internet becomes a whole lot easier when you use the right tools. And delicious feeds are among the best filters out there for the mass of content that exists on the web.