Mac OSX Tiger: Combining smart folders with del.icio.us, furl, etc.

I spend more time trying to figure out what to do with all these new amazing blog technologies than actually using them. Finally, I arrived to something that you may find useful.

Like many people, I use Furl, del.icio.us and CiteULike to store things I intend to read in the future. In del.icio.us I tag them with to_do and in Furl, the system allows you to mark each item as read or unread. On another side, on my mac, I use the blue label to mark those items (mainly pdfs) that I need to read. Then, I use a smart folder, named "to read" that shows all files labeled blue. Nice.

Problem: The smart folder only searches in the disk, and sometimes I don't remember if an item is in furl, in CiteULike, in del.icio.us or elsewhere.

Solution: In Safari, I went to my del.icio.us page to see my to_read tag (http://del.icio.us/myusername/to_read), and dragged the URL from Safari to my disk. That created a .webloc file that I labeled blue, and voilá: now when I click my smart "to read" folder I have my to_read del.icio.us page at a glance. A similar thing can be done with Furl, or CiteULike (this is left as an exercise for the reader). Now I am a click away of all my unread items!

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