Using the del.icio.us plugin

The sidebar widget is a wonderful thing. It makes it so easy to change the layout of your sidebars and add additional widgets without having to write a single line of code.

I wrote about the Sidebar Widget on single property sites. Included in with the sidebar widget is the del.icio.us plugin.

I use this little plugin on all the blogs I author. It is very handy. But I don’t think many other people use it or even give it a thought.

I was reading a thread over at Real Estate Webmasters on social bookmarking. One of those replying stated they never used del.icio.us.

I use it as a repository for all the sites I want to bookmark and comeback to later. I also use it in conjunction with the plugin.

1. set up a delicious account
2. add it to your browser toolbar
3. activate the del.icio.us plugin
4. enter a tag for the plugin
5. enter a title for the plugin

When you tag something in delicious with that tag it will automatically show up in your sidebar as soon as you tag it.

I know that might not make sense so here is an example of how I use it.

I have the del.icio.us plugin set up on the Tucson Real Estate in the News blog to tucson-real-estate-news. If I read an article in the paper about Tucson real estate I go to that article on the paper’s web site and I tag it with the tucson-real-estate-news tag.

The link and title immediately show up on the blog. If the title is longer than I want I can go into my del.icio.us account and edit the title.

The Oro Valley Real Estate blog has it’s own tag of oro-valley-news. You saw that one coming.

I also have it on this blog. It is down at the bottom of the right hand navigation titled “Items of Interest”

It is a handy little plugin. I’m sure many of you can come up with a way to use this plugin on your blog. It is a quick and easy way to share a list of links where you want your readers to go.

As an aside, the paper makes these article free to search for a couple of weeks, but after that you have to pay per article to get them out of the archive, but if you have the link already, it always works. This is another advantage to this little plugin and del.icio.us.