After months of work, the new Delicious is almost ready to come out of the oven. When we release it, you'll be automatically logged out of your account and will have to log in again, due to some changes we're making behind the scenes. That means now is a good time to make sure you know your username and password . Your username is what you see in the address bar when you visit your bookmarks ) http://del.icio.us/your_username, soon to become http://delicious.

Over the past year or two, I've been delighted to notice educators and librarians embracing Delicious both as a way to share bookmarks with each other and a way to help their students and patrons learn. This makes perfect sense to me as a college student because I bookmark and tag references for all my projects and I'd love to see similar collections from my professors and classmates. I don't know who first realized the potential of Delicious for education,

Firefox 3 users, rejoice! Today I'm pleased to announce a beta release of an enhanced version of our Firefox Add-on for del.icio.us that now has full Firefox 3 support while retaining Firefox 2 compatibility. While it is largely similar to the release version of our Firefox Add-on,

One of the many great things about working on del.icio.us is hearing from people who really grok what we do and why we're doing it. This enthusiasm takes many forms, and we've definitely been blown away by interest in our preview as well as the overwhelming response for our old swag . It's all great, and it's extra-great when someone creates something that's extra-special. For all of you who struggle to explain Social Bookmarking to your family and friends,

Delicious is four years old today. Happy birthday! We've obviously got some big things coming soon , but to commemorate the occasion, here are some early screenshots I recently uncovered; one picture is probably within the first one hundred bookmarks saved.

Fresh news from deep within Tag Mountain: we just launched an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign we've been working on for the past few months. We've refreshed the UI, built an entirely new )and faster( search engine, and added numerous improvements based on your feedback. The goal of this Preview is to get feedback from our users about the design changes and also start to put our new platform through the paces. The initial invite list is already full,

Do you want some del.icio.us stickers? Or a few del.icio.us bookmarks - the kind you put inside books? We have a surplus of dots here at the tag mines, and we'd like to distribute them more evenly around the world. To get some schwag, mail a self-addressed stamped envelope to the following address: Yahoo! Inc. c/o del.icio.us 2821 Mission College Blvd. Santa Clara, CA 95054-1838 We'll fill it with goodies and send it back to you. If you want to,

As mentioned here before , the del.icio.us team is presently in the midst of a major project: building a new platform which will speed up the site and help us grow even faster. At the same time we're also taking a close look at our UI and exploring ways to make it both easier to use and more functional. Over the years we've heard a lot of feedback, both positive and negative. Many folks like the simple and terse nature of the site,

Our friends over at Six Apart write : If you have a TypePad blog, you can now make it easy for your readers to bookmark your stories on del.icio.us by automatically including a "save to del.icio.us" link in your post footers " without having to learn a single line of template code. Just sign into your account, navigate to your blog's design tab, choose "Select Content" and configure your post footer. In the past,

We've just launched our own official del.icio.us application for Facebook. It's super easy to use; just visit our setup page , and after a few clicks you'll be able add del.icio.us to your Facebook Profile page. The application lets you post a summary of your bookmarking activity to your Mini-Feed. It can also be configured to show your latest bookmarks so your friends can easily see what you've been reading. Give it a shot and let us know what you think.

Adobe Illustrator is one of my favorite design tools, and as part of the redesign of del.icio.us I've been using it in a number of interesting ways. For example, I've written JavaScript code to pull in and parse del.icio.us RSS feeds then automatically render my latest designs in Illustrator using real data. This allows us to rapidly iterate on the design well before anyone has to write any real code.

Delicious is looking for a skilled C++ developer of exceptional ability to join us in Santa Clara, CA and help shape the next version of our website. If you are fluent in C++, enjoy solving difficult puzzles and welcome the chance to work on a large distributed system that millions of users use everyday, I want to hear from you . Abe Taha,

For the past few months, we've been working on a new del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for Firefox. We quietly released it to the addons.mozilla.org community to see what would happen, and we've been constantly working on it to make it great for our core community of users. Since that launch, we've received loads of great feedback and have been working non stop to address the biggest requests from the community. After months of hard work,