Today, the Delicious team has put up an FAQ page which clearly states that Delicious isn’t shutting down but the company has been acquired by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, the founders of YouTube. It’s interesting to note that YouTube founders will use Delicious on their new Internet company named AVOS, which is yet to be launched for public.

Yahoo says that Delicious.com will continue to work normally until July 2011 and all your Delicious bookmarks will be automatically transitioned to the new bookmarking service (AVOS), which is going to launch somewhere during August this year.

Transfer Delicious Bookmarks to AVOS

Starting today, when you login in to your Delicious.com account, you will see a notification screen which details a couple of information regarding your Delicious account, why Yahoo is shutting down Delicious and what happens to your Delicious bookmarks post migration. If you want to simply transfer the bookmarks from Delicious to AVOS, all you have to do is hit the “ I Agree” button, which will confirm that you agree with the new company’s terms of service and privacy policy.

By opting in to migrate your Delicious date to the new company, you agree that your Delicious username, password, email address, account settings, inbox items, tags, notes, descriptions and bookmark bundles will be transferred under your account at the new bookmarking service. If you don’t want to use yet another online bookmarking service or rarely use any of them, it would be better to manually backup all your Delicious bookmarks and data as an HTML file and import the HTML file to Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera or Internet Explorer.

What does the new company wants to do with a literally dying bookmarking service ? Expand it’s feature set ? Add new dimensions or incorporate it with YouTube ? AVOS says that the idea to acquire Delicious from Yahoo is to solve the ever expanding problem of “Information overload”

We have no idea what the YouTube founders are up to and since, AVOS.com’s official blog is down at the time of writing this post, we will have to wait for a couple of months and see the real purpose of acquiring Delicious

Delicious.com Gets A New Home originally published on Ampercent

Or you are completing a project which requires snapshots of websites, images, web documents to be saved in a central location, which can be accessed from any computer you want to. While bookmarking blog posts or articles for later reading is easily achieved using, Read it Later – the same is not true for saving a webpage as PDF in Google Chrome.

However, if you want to use Google docs for bookmarking and reading web pages,the Send to Google Docs extension for Google Chrome can come in really handy.

The extension makes it really easy to email webpages, images, photos, blog posts, URL’s or any other web elements directly to your Google Docs account. Works quite simple – install the extension in Google Chrome and browse the web as you normally do. Whenever you’re reading an article at Wikipedia, checking a Flickr Photo album, browsing through a news aggregator and want to copy the same webpage to your Google Docs account, simply hit the extension button once.

That’s all – the extension will capture a full page snapshot of the current webpage and save the images as a PDF document directly in your Google Docs account. You can use the extension to save webpages, images and other media formats any number of times – there are no upper limits as such.

For example: I tried the above extension on the homepage of this blog and here is how the result looks inside my Google docs account:

Now that the copy of the webpage is saved on your Google Docs account, you can later download it as a PDF document for offline reading. All the links and images in the original webpage will be kept intact in the PDF copy. This method can be a really good workaround to read blogs and websites that are blocked at workplace, school or office. Firefox users can install the Send to Google Docs add-on using this link

Tip: How to use Google docs as a Blogging tool

Send Web pages as PDF to Google Docs From Google Chrome originally published on Ampercent

Sign up for a free account and you will taken to view a short tour on how to organize the links. Once you are in the main page, go ahead and use the “Add new link” in the right side to add links.

You can also choose to delete any unwanted link by using the icon. You can also move the link to a new list or share it with your friends.

Create new group by using the + symbol at the top to organize similar links. This will create a new tab under which you can add new links that belongs to this group.

You can also customize how your start page looks like. To do that go to Account > Settings > Design.

You can also share your links with people by going to Accounts > My Profile. Do as instructed to share your profile with others.

The tool serves a great purpose if you need to carry your bookmarks along with you. All you need to do is login to your Get Wapps account and click the link of your choice.

Get Wapps: Online Bookmark Manager originally published on Ampercent

Another option is to specify a list of URL’s in Firefox options, just separate the URL’s with a comma. When you start Firefox, these website(s) will load in new tabs automatically. (see example)

Both these features are good but if your bookmark folders is not short and contains a whole lot of pages, you need a smart alternative.

Let’s say you want to open your email, Facebook account, Twitter account, Blog account, Adsense, Google Analytics and other websites in new tabs every morning. You want an easier option to open multiple pages with a single click and don’t want to click each bookmark from the bookmarks toolbar.

In such cases, Morning Coffee extension will be very useful. The add-on lets you create customized profiles and sets of bookmarks, which can be opened with a single click. After the add-on is insalled, you will notice a small Cofee cup icon placed just left to the browser address bar.

Go ahead in the add-on preferences and you can add your favorite sites to any day or every day of the week.

The interesting part is that Morning Coffee can open different pages on Firefox start, depending upon the present day of the week. You may want to open a specific set of sites on a specific day of the week, just add the list in the add-on preferences and you are done.

When you start Firefox, the add-on will detect the today’s day and open all the pages in new tabs. Very handy, when you want to have a quick access list of sites to open and don’t want the long bookmarks bar nagging in the middle.

By the way, you can use Morning Coffee to open a set of sites at any time of the day, not just morning. Did I told you that you can open multiple pages and automatically login with a Greasemonkey script ?

Open Multiple Pages or Bookmarks in Firefox With One Click originally published on Ampercent

A good way to organize browser bookmarks is to use folders and subfolders, you can place these folders on the bookmarks toolbar and quickly load a bookmark without having to hunt down from the long list of bookmarks on bookmarks menu (favorites menu in case of Internet Explorer).

Another advantage of using folders is that you can categorize different bookmarks according to type and create “groups” which helps in quick navigation and search.

If you want to declutter your bookmarks toolbar and get rid of broken links, AM Deadlink is a freeware tool which will be useful. The application can detect dead and duplicate links from your browser’s bookmarks menu. The application is portable and supports Internet explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera , Google chrome and Netscape.

Once the application is installed, select the browser from the pull down menu and hit “Check”. You will get a list of all the bookmarks with their URL’s and the status of the links. If there are broken or dead links, you can simply delete them from the application’s interface. Am Deadlink also shown the absolute path of a link and the path where the address is redirecting.

The good thing about AM Deadlink is that it lets you export the Name, URL, absolute path and the folder of all your bookmarks to a CSV file. This will be useful, if you want to know all the URL’s contained in a specific folder on your bookmarks toolbar. There is a sleek “Duplicate button”, clicking which sorts out all the duplicate links from the browser’s  bookmarks menu.

You can also import URL’s from a CSV file and check the status of the links or download the favicon of a bookmark using Am Deadlink. All in all, if you have messed your bookmarks menu with lots of duplicate or dead links, AM Deadlink saves the day!

More tips on Bookmarking:

1. How to sync bookmarks between multiple browsers
2. Organize your Collection of Bookmarks online.

How to Detect and Delete Broken Bookmarks From Your Browser using AM Deadlink originally published on Ampercent

When you sign up you can save your bookmarks to your ‘My Homepage’. This is a cool little page where you can drag and drop your bookmarks to organize them however you want. You can bookmark websites, images, videos and news articles. Everything is organized by tags which makes it easy to find the bookmark you saved two weeks ago. You can even email links to friends.

Another feature is the password vault which allows you to save a username and password for every bookmark you have on your account.  This makes it easier for you to remember your passwords and also safer. Online security is a very important issue and more people should have strong passwords.

You can make a password so strong even you forget it – but with myhomepage’s password vault you will always be able to find it again. They also allow you to automatically log into some websites. This is great, you can log into Facebook with just one click. However the number of websites it supports isn’t that large and it would be great if they could have more.

Overall, we think the best thing about myhomepage is that it is completely online. You can access all your favorites from anywhere. Most people use their browsers to save bookmarks but having them online makes them easier to use and is very convenient if you use a lot of different computers.

A couple of negatives are that there aren’t that many websites supported by the Auto Login feature and we think it would be great if there was some element of personalization for the homepage (after all it is ‘myhomepage’). But aside from this, we think myhomepage will continue to develop and grow into a big contender for the likes of Delicious and iGoogle.

Why not try myhomepage? It’s completely free.

Myhomepage: Organize Your Bookmarks and Manage Passwords Online originally published on Ampercent

MultiRow Bookmarks adds multiple rows in Firefox Bookmarks toolbar so that you have a lot of space to organize bookmarks and links. You can add as many rows as you want. Wow!

Once the add-on is installed, restart Firefox and go to “Tools > Options > Multirow Bookmarks“. Select the number of rows you want to show in the bookmarks toolbar.

Next, click “View > Toolbars > Customize” to add a new bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. Once the new toolbar is added, you can simply drag and drop folders on to it.

I know multiple rows takes up a lot of space on the screen but you can use another Firefox add-on to autohide the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. The toolbar is revealed only when you hover over the area where the bookmarks toolbar is placed.

Here is a quick video which shows how you can use both the add-ons to add extra rows and hide the toolbars when you are not using them:

Related trick: Open multiple bookmarks in a click and Autologin.

Add Multiple Rows In Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar originally published on Ampercent

Well, there are a lot of blogs whom I follow on a regular basis. But i never search the blogs directly by visiting them one after another. Rather I use a central place to search all of them – Google.

Search any Website Using Google

If the website or blog where you want to search is popular and well known, then they would be certainly indexed at Google. You can use a simple site operator to search a particular website about a particular topic.

For example: If I want to check for published articles about Google docs at Ampercent, I would use the following search operator query

google docs site:ampercent.com

Here is how the results looks (example)

As you can see, the search result pages contains articles about “Google docs” from this site only. Using this technique you can search any website or blog with Google, as long as it is indexed.

Use a Site Search Bookmarklet

You can create a simple site search bookmarklet and use the bookmarklet to search the site without requiring to use any search box or opening the homepage over and over again.

For example: Just drag and drop the following bookmarklet in your Bookmarks toolbar.

Ampercent – Search

When you want to search this site just hit the bookmarklet and enter your search query in the pop up box that opens. Hit enter and you can directly load the search results in a new browser window.

A similar bookmarklet can be created for any blog or website (read tutorial).

Do you know any other method to search a specific website without actually opening it ? Do let us know through a comment.

How to Search any Website or Blog Without Opening it originally published on Ampercent

One solution to automatically sync bookmarks between multiple browsers in using an online bookmarking service like Google Bookmarks, Delicious etc. The advantage of using online bookmarking services is that you can access all your bookmarks from any browser from any computer in the world because all your bookmarks are stored inside your account. The disadvantage: Not a one click option – can be tiring when you have to install a toolbar all through.

Synchronize bookmarks across Multiple Browsers – Some options

Using an online bookmarking service : Good option but the only problem: It’s the speed that turns you off. Say you store your bookmarks in Google bookmarks. You have to sign in to your Google account every now and then and it becomes more problematic if you use multiple Google accounts. It isn’t a one click solution to bookmark pages and use them on the fly.

Manual Export-Import: Of course you can manually backup bookmarks of your browsers as an Html file and import it in the other browsers. But you can’t wake up every morning and sit down to sync the browser bookmarks between all your browsers.

Delicious: Delicious can export your browser bookmarks and you can later import them into another browser but still it isn’t a simple option. You have to install Google toolbar in all the browsers and perform the synching process.

Xmarks: Formerly known as Foxmarks, Xmarks can sync browser bookmarks between Firefox and Internet Explorer only. You cannot export bookmarks using Xmarks into Google chrome, opera and Safari. Thus the job synching process remains incomplete.

Browser Back Up Software’s: The last option to back up bookmarks is using browser back up software for Firefox, Google chrome, Internet Explorer. But again this is not an easy solution and requires much effort.

How can I Synchronize bookmarks between Different Browsers

Transmute is just the tool you need. It can export and synchronize bookmarks between any pair of browsers. Apart from backing up the bookmarks, it can also merge your bookmarks in existing collections without overwriting the old bookmarks file.

Just pick the source browser and the destination browser and you are ready for the synchronization process. If you wish to back up the older collection in destination browser, transmute does that perfectly.

Transmute supports all the popular browsers. Here is a short screencast that describes the bookmark synchronization of Firefox and Chrome using Transmute.

How to Sync Bookmarks across Multiple Browsers and Store a Back up copy Online

So you are afraid that you can lose all your bookmarks in case of a system crash. In that case, you can use Google chrome, which now supports bookmark synchronization with Google bookmarks.

1. Open Google chrome and sign in to your Google account.

2. Click the wrench icon in extreme right and select “Bookmark sync”

3. Enable synchronization of the bookmarks with your Google Bookmarks account.

That’s it. Now the bookmarks stored in Google chrome will be automatically synchronized online with your Google bookmarks account. How do you synchronize bookmarks across all your browsers ?

How to Sync Bookmarks between Firefox, Chrome and Other Browsers Automatically originally published on Ampercent

Note : The following search bookmarklet works only if the search keyword ends up in the URL. Should perfectly work for Blogs Using the Default WordPress Search Feature or Blogs using Google Custom Search. This bookmarklet also works in case you have a blogger blog.

Following are the steps involved

1.Drag and Drop Make search Bookmarklet In your bookmarks toolbar.

2.Go to Your blog or any other website for which you want to create the bookmarklet.enter a Keyword In the search Box  and Hit enter.

3.While  in the Search result page of that Blog Hit the Bookmarklet that You dropped in The Bookmarks bar in Step 1

You will see  the  following screen

4.Type the keyword that you used in the site search box in “type in Keyword you used” Field.

5.Give your Bookmarklet a name and click Submit. You will have a Link  of your site search bookmarklet in the next page. Just drag and drop that site search bookmarklet in your Bookmarks toolbar and whenever you wish to search your site use it .(See example).

And here is a  short video describing the above process.

What are you waiting for ? Go create your own blog bookmarklet now

Make a Site search bookmarklet for any Blog or Website originally published on Ampercent