Keep a del.icio.us schedule

If there are those of you that do not use del.icio.us in your day to day work and to do listing. I think I have a reason to use it for you now.

Ready?

It is a simple one.

OK. Here it is.

Tags.

Now, you are probably thinking, “What do you think I am? An idiot? I know about and use tags all the time! My cat is tagged as feline, demanding, wierd, furry-not-sexual!”

Please hear me out though, because I think I found something not many others do.

I had been ignoring the social bookmarking thing for a while, with the idea that I should not need a web connection to keep my bookmarks up to date. However, I realized that this could be the best tool ever for managing my to do lists as well. Here is what I am doing:

1. First, get your del.icio.us account. Easy enough there.
2. Next, take all of the sites you read and get them on there.
• In Firefox, it was easier for me to open a bookmark folder at a time with the Open In Tabs option at the bottom of each Firefox bookmark folder then tag them with a bookmarklet or extension. I use this extension over the default del.icio.us one as it applys a much better pre-populated tag list.
3. Include in these links any links to RSS feeds you want to keep. Or just subscribe to a subsection of one of the aggregators.
4. Now you are able to Tag each of the items. Keep in mind how much each feed generates and split them based on How Much?, How Often? and How Important?
• Day of the week (like I did for the sites that update regularly)
• Tiddler tag. You could use 1-31 as tags and Jan-Dec as well.
• GTD List type (@Computer-Home for example)
5. When you get done, I would recommend making Clouds of the Tags as follows
• Frequency (or something like that) the Days of the week or other regular items
• @Action for your @ tags
• Tiddler cloud (or 43Folders) for your tiddler links. Just move your your days of the month from Tiddler to Future Tiddler as your tag cloud if you want to keep it all on del.icio.us or you can make a script greasemonkey script to load each of those based on the day you look it up.
• Archive/Notes for anything you are done with reading indefinately.

This essentially gives you a way to manage the reading of your daily sites and keeping yourself in check with the “Has anything new come up yet?” impulse.

As another option, Tags can be put up for a workgroup (for a non-private setting, of course) and then used to organize in the same way. I am thinking of writing a greasemonkey script to handle local files. It winds up getting posted as a preformatted link to redirect you to a page telling you that it is not supported, but I am not sure if it gets trimmed off regularly.
For Example:

My extension list for Firefox, saved as ExtensionList.html puts http://del.icio.us/doc/dangerous# in front of the file:/// tag to direct you to the page telling you it does not support tagging thos.
If I can make a script to remove that leader from the link, which should be easy enough, then I can handle local tags too.

If you want to see where I am so far, check out my del.icio.us page to see what I have placed there. Please comment and let me know if you have better options or ideas too.