In the dim and distant past, I was using del.icio.us, mostly as a way of keeping track of interesting sites and articles I’ve read. Basically it was a mechanism for sharing bookmarks amongst the plethora of browsers and platforms I use — rather than using the social components. My use of it has tailed off, but I’m looking to start organising myself a little better again.

I’m looking for two components to my ‘ideal’ bookmarking solution:

• Mark interesting articles by tagging/categorising them so that I can find them again in the future. This is more or less how I was using del.icio.us, though perhaps I could have done with being more judicious since I didn’t then use the stock of bookmarks to retrieve items again.

• Record everything I’ve read. Well, maybe not absolutely everything, but most things that I do read. This one has to be really easy to use — ideally something I can automate in Firefox in some way (ctrl-l marks it as “read and liked”, ctrl-k marks it as “read and thought was utter tripe”).

I’m reasonably happy with using del.icio.us for the former (though I do wonder if any of the other social bookmarking services would offer anything different/better?). I was having a wee look at reddit for the latter, since I’d somehow inferred that it would be a good match, but their reddiquette says that I should look for dupes before posting something. Ah, it’s more of a social rating site like digg then… So I wonder if I should be using del.icio.us as my “I’ve read it” along with a very simple tag structure (@read, @toread, @like, @dislike) and use something else for the bookmarking?

I’ll give you an example of where the latter is useful. I know that, at some point during my blog reading in the past week, I read about customising the books that Aperture creates. I wish I could find it now, since Annabel was working on a wedding album book at the weekend, but I didn’t, so I can’t. If I’d marked it as “I’ve read this”, then I’d be able to find it again. (And my browser’s history isn’t much good, because it could have been on one of two computers and I’d have to filter out all the rubbish, what with doing web development all day…)

So, what would you suggest? Or are there better ways of tackling the plethora of material I read every day in such a way as to make interesting stuff easy to find in the future, and the “ooh, I know I read that somewhere” at all findable?