Mmm... Delicious!

Do you ever use the 'Favourites' menu at the top of your browser? For those who aren't sure what it does, you can use it to create a list of your favourite websites so that they can quickly be retrieved, without the need to remember the address of each one. This is a really handy service, but its drawback is that you can only access your list from the computer where you've saved it. What if you're at the internet cafe, or at work, and suddenly need to access some of those sites which are saved on your machine at home..?

Enter Delicious! This is a popular social bookmarking website, which basically allows you to set up a free account where you can store all of the websites that you find useful, so that you can quickly access them from any machine. Delicious also has additional functions which allow you to enter descriptions of websites to remind you why you saved them in the first place, or you can instruct the service to alert you if someone else has 'tagged' a website with keywords which relate to your own interests, and there are plenty of other useful features. And if all of this sounds tempting but you don't seem to get on too well with Delicious, then why not take a look at Furl which offers a similar service?

While we're on the subject of internet tips, I'd like to add a quick reminder to students to take a look at the EYES search engine (see this previous post for details). Feedback of any kind about this service, whether positive or negative, would be very welcome as it will all help to develop the finished version which will be available on this site.