Online How-To Tools

Although my consulting workload does not leave much time for blogging this week, I wanted to at least start the week off with an article. Maybe I’ll get a chance to do an additional one later this week.

Last month I mentioned the use of a how-to directory as a way of saving how-to information on your computer. There are also ways you can save information online, and I cover two of them in this post:

• Use of del.ic.ious (soon to be renamed to Delicious), a site that has been around for a long time and which several of you probably already use
• Use of the new Safari Labs How-To, a beta of which is available to subscribers of Safari Online.

Embarrassingly, I have not been saving articles on Delicious until fairly recently, and have really screwed myself out of building up a large library of material that interests me. I do now use a Firefox add-in that lets me save to Delicious any web page that I find of interest, and there are many.

What I really like about Delicious is that it lets you store bookmarks using tags. You can create your own tag names or choose from a list of popular tags (or both). Some of the tags I use are shown in the screenshot to the right.

I highly recommend this add-in. If you are not big on such browser add-ins, you will find that most blogs have a convenient way of helping you add their articles to Delicious. For example, on this blog, you can use the “Share This” link at the end of this article to add this article to Delicious (or to Digg It, add it to Technorati, etc.) You can do that for any article on this site, and, as noted, many sites have a similar tool.

I am now accumulating a library of how-to links on my Delicious page, and am finding it to be very useful. For example, if I want to look over the GTD how-to links that I have saved there, I just click my “gtd” tag and get a listing of the articles. For each of these articles, when you add them you can also add descriptive information as well as tags.

And, of course, you do not have to limit the use of Delicious tags to How-To type information: you can store links of any sort there, such as links to online reprints of speeches by your favorite political candidates, and so on.

Now to the second tool: the Safari How-To repository. Unlike with Delicious, this one is not free. But, also unlike Delicious, you do not have to put your own information into it. Instead, if you are a Safari Bookshelf subscriber:

You can search for and view 50 How Tos, even if the books from which they are drawn are not on your bookshelf. After 50 views, you can view preview versions of additional How To content.

And these are some pretty darned good How-To’s. The following snapshot is from one of the ones I read, on How-To Protect Your Home Wi-Fi Network:

If you want to join their premium service (about $40 per month), you get the following:

• Unlimited access to thousands of books
• 100+ instructional video courses
• Rough Cuts service
• Full access to the Beta version of Safari How To on Safari Labs which contains over 70,000 How Tos drawn from more than 400 books

Given the widely recognized quality of the Safari material, this is a very good deal for a lot of people. It is certainly not for everyone, though. But, it is a neat tool, and I think it will be interesting to see what sort of competition develops in this market.

Tagged as: How To, technology