What is mischievous?

What do you do when you come across an interesting link in an article that you are reading on the Web? Do you click and follow the link, then get back to your original article when you are done reading the linked article? Or do you continue reading the original article to the end, and then go back and click through the interesting links?

With mischievous, you can just drag and drop the interesting links you come across into your own browse queue. You can then go back to your queue whenever you have time. mischievous uses del.icio.us to manage your queue. Thus, your queue is available from any computer connected to the Net, with or without mischievous.

But thats not all! mischievous also lets you access and manage your favorites on del.icio.us.

Installing mischievous

mischievous is a browser plugin for Internet Explorer (yeah, I am one of those), and it requires the Microsoft .NET framework (version 1.1 or above) to be installed. You probably already have the .NET framework on your computer. If not, you can download it from here.

Download mischievous now.

After you install mischievous restart IE and invoke mischievous from the View|Explorer Bar menu in IE (Alt-V-E-V). If mischievous isn't listed in the menu, you will need to logoff and login to Windows to let IE refresh the list of explorer bars.

Using mischievous

Login

At the mischievous login prompt, login using your del.icio.us credentials. If you don't have an account on del.icio.us, you can create it here.

Selecting save credentials will save your username and password so you don't have to type it the next time. The credentials are saved in clear text in your registry, so select this ONLY if you are cool with your roommate swiping your password.

Once you have saved your credentials, to delete it you need to clear the username and password fields, uncheck save credentials and click on login. Hacky? Hmm.

Queue

The Queue tab lists the URLs in your browse queue. You can add URLs to your queue by dragging and dropping them onto the Queue tab. You can drag the links in pages into your queue. To add the current page, you can drag the URL from IE's address bar onto the Queue tab or (even better) by clicking on the q button on the mischievous toolbar.

Click an item in your queue to navigate to that page. To delete an item in your queue, you need to select it and either hit the Del key on your keyboard or click the - button on the mischievous toolbar.

Favorites

The Favorites tab lists all your URLs from del.icio.us. You can add URLs to your favorites by dragging and dropping onto the Favorites tab. Just like with the queue, you can drag URLs from pages or drag the current URL from IE's address bar. You can also add the current page to your favorites by clicking on the + button on the mischievous toolbar.

Tags in del.icio.us are represented as folders in mischievous (e.g. coolapps and juggling in the image on the right are tags). The tagged URLs show as items contained in the folder. URLs with multiple tags will be listed in multiple folders.

To delete a URL, select it and hit the Del key on your keyboard or click the - button on the mischievous toolbar. Deleting a multi-tagged URL in a folder, will delete the URL from del.icio.us and not just delete the tag it belongs under.

To collapse the tree of URLs, click the « button on the mischievous toolbar. To expand the tree of favorites, click ».

Click r on the mischievous toolbar to refresh the URLs in your queue and in your favorite list.

Tags

When you add a URL to your favorites, you will see the dialog on the right. (Adding a URL to the queue doesn't invoke this dialog.) Here you can add multiple space-delimited tags and the description for the URL. To re-tag a URL, right-click on the URL in either the queue or the favorites list. This will invoke the same dialog and you can delete or add new tags. URLs in your queue are tagged with "q". Deleting the "q" tag on a URL in the queue and adding other tags, will "move" the URL to your favorite list.

Version History

Comments and Feedback

Comments and feedback, brickbats and bouquets, are all welcome!

Click here to join our discussion forum, or you can subscribe directly by entering your email address below.