I don’t know if this has been done before - it’s so simple that it probably has - but I’m going to post it anyway.

I’ve been looking for a quick and easy solution to allow me to see a list of my del.icio.us tags in my Firefox window. I tag items in del.icio.us using Rojolicious or within Rojo with some frequency, but I try to keep a lid on my del.icio.us taglist and not have it grow to mondo-huge proportions because I like to be able to find my stuff. I’d also like to use del.icio.us as my master tag list. Doing either of those things becomes a little more difficult when I’m tagging something outside of the del.icio.us interface, where I don’t have the advantage of the dynamic list of my tags.

While I’ve been pondering doing something like the Mouseover DOM Inspector (MODI) bookmarklet or a similar Greasemonkey script, or even making my first foray into the XUL world and building an extension to do this, but this morning I decided that I wanted at least a simple stop-gap and started hunting around. None of the Firefox extensions seemed to offer what I was looking for, and my suite of tagging tools is sufficient for right now so I didn’t want to add any tagging tools to the mix anyway.

Here’s what I came up with. I browsed to the del.icio.us api for the list of my tags (in my case, http://del.icio.us/api/tags/get?kinrowan). I then used my multi-tagging bookmarklet to tag that page with the del.icio.us tag “tags“. Then I navigated to that page and added a LiveBookmark in Firefox and dragged it to the top of my bookmarks list. Now when I want to see what tags I’m currently using in del.icio.us, I open my bookmark sidebar and have an expandable list of the current state of my tags. This has the added side-benefit of enabling me to click on one of those items in the LiveBookmark folder and navigate to that tag page in del.icio.us.

<Cori pats self on back>

Later… Just remembered. You have to refresh your LiveBookmark when you think there’ll be changes