I also tried to use notion.so (an amazing tool !) to manage my bookmarks, but the plugin "Notion Web Clipper" does not allow to add tags when you save a link.
And you, how do you deal with your bookmarks? Any good tips to keep interesting resources close to you?
Or...
Stop collecting the internet and give your brain a break from data overload. There is a certain flavour of FOMO that keeps tabs open forever and bookmark lists getting huge. Let go of it all. There will always be more data to consume every day, you'll never have time for that AND 5k of bookmarks. Use Google when you want to go back to something. I bet if you deleted 90% of those bookmarks you would not really miss them after a month.
How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is virtually unlimited, and we can only collect so many bookmarks anyway. Searching through bookmarks isn’t a difficult task, and it’s way better than relying on google.
I think for me there is so much information coming at me every day, that I rarely have time to go back to something later. I bookmark a select number of sites for projects/interests I am working on but I couldn't deal with having ~5k worth of bookmarks in my backlog. I just don't have time for managing/triaging/reviewing that.
My comment about FOMO addresses the fear of 'what if I can't find this stuff again'. It's more akin to a hoarding mentality, I suppose. How many people's garages are full of junk they 'think they might come back to later'. It's something I actively eschew because if I allow that thought process to enter into my life I'll be hindered by the activity, and the ability to let go is important to my happiness and wellbeing. I literally can't sleep at night if I think that I might missed out on archiving something I might need. I find it enlightening to treat the world as ephemeral.
I freely admit different people work/think/live in different ways and perhaps my original comment was a little flippant.
Time and experience have shown me that sites are ephemeral and Google is constantly changing things, so that's why I archive the things that I find most useful.
(Slightly more seriously, if you get Pinboard archiving you can actually search the saved text of the bookmarks)
Should I need actual PDF editing, I'd open all of the bookmarks I filed under "utilities/PDF" over the years to find something useful: a lean compromise between proactively installing unneeded software and ignoring interesting things I stumble upon.
I'd expect to do a web search for promising software that might have been moved since I bookmarked it, which would be obviously a smaller and easier task than a more open-ended search.
Yeah, good luck with that. Most of the things I bookmark are things that were really hard to find in the first place. Google isn't much help with stuff like that.
For years [1] I’ve been looking for a browser extension that will let me flip a switch and search only within the sites in my history and/or bookmarks.
You know you’ve visited some sites with the answer you want, but have to try to recreate the divine moment in google.
[1]: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/46270/solut...
I did: https://historio.us
EDIT: It's back up, now I have to figure out why acme can't automatically renew... Very odd.
The whole point of bookmarks for me is to offload brain load. Rather than memorize little facts that are 99% useless, I can use an insignificant amount of storage to save a massive amount of information in case I ever need it. It's nice you don't have a need for them, but for those of us who do, "let go if it all" isn't helpful
1) Read-later
Something interesting you want to read. Items in this category should be automatically removed after a certain period of time, so it doesn't get out of hand. New RSS feed items would also fit into this category.
2) Save-for-later
Something you're sure will be useful down the road. This should be retrieved first and foremost using a powerful full-text search engine. Minimal tagging can also be very helpful. Lastly, it's critical these items are archived by the bookmark manager so you always have the content even if the website shuts down.
3) Todo
Something you need to take action on. For example, buy this product, try this new open-source library, install an app, etc. These should have optional reminders to alert you at a certain day or time.
Currently my system is a terrible mess: I email myself for read-later and todo but put save-for-later in Pocket. This is very frustrating because there's tons of bookmark manager options but none support all 3 types, most have terrible search, are slow, and don't have full-text search or archival.
So last year I started building what's going to be the Superhuman of Bookmark Managers:
https://AcornBookmarks.com
It will be 100% open-source and available as a hosted service.
I'm focusing on the fundamentals: speed, performance, robustness. I'm using PouchDB, so all your data is 100% offline which makes it very, very fast. Of course, it'll support all 3 bookmark types, have full-text search and archival. It'll run on all browsers and platforms, including mobile apps built in react-native. It's UI is going to be fun, geeky, and beautiful sci-fi with multiple light/dark color themes.
If this sounds interesting, sign-up on the site — I'd love to chat with you about this.
I also favorite YC items.
If you're not then don't store them, just google them when you need them. That will either help you find the link you wanted, or it will find you something better, because the world has moved on since then.
the whole point of bookmarks is to be able to retrieve the info later. that archive has helped me SO many times.
EDIT: Looks like Pinboard does this already! Mea culpa.
it doesn't suggest links to you and the visual style is very different.
It's run by a single developer who responds quickly to feedback.
IMNSHO it's worth every penny.
I made an app that shows me N of my previous bookmarks per day at random, loosely following spaced repetition. Seeing the same articles/conversations/tutorials multiple times helps me to recall them when needed, and I sometimes have serendipitous ideas.
I've been doing this for years and it's amazing how much of the internet is broken. Maybe 20% of my bookmarks don't load and require the wayback machine. hacker news comment pages always work though :)
Edit: Reddit is a possible example of the above, but what I meant is an automatic curation of search to niche ness or specificity of people.
I manually save urls to a file in broad categories and occasionally import them into a database. It parses titles tags, favicons and some content. Some times I do different ml things with page content (lsi models, summaries, etc), but not recently.
Literally anyone here could make this in an afternoon
https://github.com/calpaterson/quarchive
It's quite early but I'm able to use it as a near replacement for pinboard (including search but not including tags). I have circa 6k bookmarks so I feel your pain.
It's based on sync of your browser bookmarks via an extension. This works well because it allows you to bookmark on your phone.
Here are some features I have planned:
1. Show what pages link to a bookmark
2. Show discussions (HN/Reddit/Lobsters) about a bookmark
3. Full text search (including of PDFs), perhaps including the above discussions
4. The ability to additionally just record everything you browse (including full text)
Right now it works for me but looks a bit basic - I plan to soup up the graphic design once I have the MVP working:
https://i.imgur.com/5VdgGU7.png
I'm hoping to make it available as a hosted service at some point
If you're interested in this topic, have feature ideas or are even interested in working on it with me either comment here or please send me email - cal@calpaterson.com . I know social bookmarking is not trendy any more but I still use it a lot and pinboard is a bit limited.
i derive _so_ much value from having well tagged items in Pinboard.
1: When I bookmark something, I make sure I add 3+ short tags. "emacs" "orgmode" "LaTeX". Or "devops" "helm" "plugin".
2: I use a Firefox extension to set a default folder for new bookmarks. It's called "Default Bookmark Folder"
3: I use the SingleFile Firefox extension set to save a copy of every page I bookmark to my Google Drive. This enables me to keep a snapshot of the page so I can refer back to it whenever I want. I use this as the directory structure: "Saved\Web\$YEAR\$MONTH\$ISODATE\$PAGETITLE.html" - example "Saved\Web\2020\01\2020-01-21\Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks.html"
Firefox's history and bookmark search are great. Its "library" window is very useful (ctrl-j or command-j)
EDIT:
I organize my firefox bookmarks toolbar on the same "bar" as the urlbar. So it goes something like this: bookmarks(gmail, music, work folder, personal folder). Back/Forward/Reload/Home. Urlbar. Extensions Icons.
EDIT2: Big shoutout to the SingleFile Firefox extension. The author, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gildas is a really great person who implemented my suggestion to add the feature to SingleFile to save pages when bookmarked. They deserve all the praise and more people should use this excellent extension (which is available for Chrome, too)
The main reason behind my building Histre is the idea that we throw away a lot of the signal we generate while doing things online and this can be put to good use for ourselves.
Bookmark management is just a special case of knowledge management. What you really need is a knowledge management tool that is easy to use. You'll get a ton of other benefits too.
As it is right now, Histre aids the casual online research we all do (ie the explore -> filter -> decide loop). For example, it removes friction in taking notes on links you're looking at, with free-form tags that you don't have to create first and other such niceties that add up. And it easy to group notes into notebooks and share. In short, when you have to look at a bunch of links for something (decide on AirBnB, people to hire, material for your next blog post, etc) Histre makes your life easier. But this is just the starting point for what Histre intends to do.
IMHO the biggest problem with apps like Evernote, Notion etc is that it becomes digital hoarding, and not a knowledge base. And the knowledge base focused apps out there involve a lot of manual upkeep, which almost never happens, especially at work. Things start out okay and quickly fall into disrepair. I'm differentiating from the other note taking apps by automatically putting together a knowledge base (grouped by topic etc).
One idea I'm excited about and I'm working on right now is: Histre automatically fetches updates from the websites you visit, ranks the websites with things like lack of ads / referral links and ranks the new posts with your 'revealed preferences' of what you tend to actually read from the list of updates previously shown etc. Personally I'm hoping for this to be a replacement for social news sites, which are too sensitive to people who bother to go upvote on /new.
Automatic Upkeep: Histre detects links/notes related to your existing notebooks and offers to update those notebooks with the new links and notes. This is similar to how Google Photos suggests new photos for your existing albums. This solves the upkeep problem. Currently people create knowledge bases with good intentions and it becomes stale and useless quite fast. This is a work in progress.
If there is anything else you want Histre to do, I'd love to hear it: hn@histre.com
Good. It means you will stop hoarding bookmarks that you don't need.
An inherent problem with digital content is that it's pretty easy and cheap to produce (with corresponding quality), and almost free to copy―but still expensive in effort to consume and take meaningful action. You need to move the balance if you want to avoid piling up digital garbage that you won't ever conscientiously touch.
If you don't have time now to not even read the articles, but to just add tags, you won't have it later either unless you take a sabbatical or retirement to go through that mess. Filing the pages in an organized system needs a quite good amount of work in exchange for a chance that you at least can find them in the future if the need arises. As a minimum, it requires that you have some understanding of what the page is about.
What we need is a way to get Google and other search engines to index our bookmarks to figure out what people value.
With the risk of sounding like someone on StackOverflow, do you even need to do this?
I have <100 bookmarks at any time and regular bookmark directories with browser sync work great. I don't have a good solution for efficiently managing thousands. But I also can't imagine that you'll ever actually read all of them, or need to re-read most of them. It's okay to see something on the internet and not save it.
Some long time ago i started adopting the habit of keeping my tab-count low to get more focus on things i need in this exact moment. I only work session-based and like to start things of clean every day. This then resulted in (obviously) lots and lots more bookmarks. But soon i realized that this is headache inducing too. Since then I try to think about if i really need this bookmark and also clean my bookmarks out every few months.
The few bookmarks i have get organized in simple folders like news, programming, books, <insert-current-project>, music. That's it. Done. Try to be minimalistic my friends! It's awesome!
Yeah, just save every page you ever open to disk. Just in case. Right? Also sync all of that data on multiple machines. But what if the syncing service disappears some day? Better ask for a self-hosted solution. But a free one. Which saves everything. Just in case anything ever gets lost. How much better life would be then.
Your browser also caches aggressively.
If targeted to specific high-value sites, or setting retention based on site / content value (some automatic, some less so, some short-lived, some logner), you'll end up with a useful and usable local archive with what is today very small amounts of storage -- even a few GB of text out of a TB or more, isn't much, and that would be a pretty extensive collection.
If the content can be reduced such that it's just necessary text (excluding web crud and more), the end result is likely much smaller still. I've experimented with reducing Washington Post articles and homepage to a simplified view, by selecting specific HTML elements, and the result weighs in at about 3-10% of the source page.
A typical online article likely runs about 800 words. If you read (or save) 20 articles a day for a year, thats about 300 MB.
You would eventually fill a 1 TB hard drive with text at that point. In about 3,400 years.
So I am now building Liste[1] thinking of it as a more power-user focused tool.
Aim is to make Liste a powerful read/watch/listen-it-later + a personal knowledge base tool. In the long run I aim to replace goodreads/imdb et al with only source of truth in my life - all stored in Liste.
Beta launch is targeted in Q1 2020. Probably by mid-feb.
[1] https://getliste.com
When I see something that could be related to a project I have, and I know that I will check it in the near future, I save a copy of the web content to OneNote. But mostly I stopped caring about bookmarking/saving everything that I find interesting.
For links I want to keep, for say education, related to a project I'm working on, or similar - I simply write them down in Inkdrop (notepad system of choice) under the relevant note/header. Honestly I don't often go back to those anyways, but they are there if I need them.
For other stuff that I want to keep around for longer, maybe "This will be interesting to read, I just don't have time now" - I send them to myself on Telegram (messenger of choice). It's search works and it's a great timeline. If I don't think about that article/topic again, or don't have free time to go back... then it gets buried and I probably will never see it again. But the link always exists and is searchable... so I don't feel like I've "lost" things completely.
After switching to a different browser for a while I just didn't port them over and realized I actually don't need any of them (Except maybe 1-5 shortcuts for sites I open often, usually they are just pinned tabs now).
I'd suggest to give it a try. I don't think I ever had the problem that I couldn't find something again and if it's important enough there will be a way to find it again.
Usually my workflows are:
1. Use the chrome extension to add something
2. Sometimes I add tags or add it to a list
3. If it's related to work I'll add it to my work organisation
For links I come across on Slack, I use the Slack app (https://slack.com/apps/AFBC4A147-tefter) to quickly bookmark any links included in a message somebody posted.
When it comes to bookmarking, plenty of options out there. For me effective collaboration was the feature missing from most of them and that's why we're building Tefter.
https://github.com/tefter/desktop
The poster pointed out that we should not have to bookmark - that why do our own browsers not simply record every site we visits (and even cache the text for alter searching).
Its technically trivial. But we all have this blind spot - that it is perfectly reasonable for massive corporations to collect where we visit, but no-one, even in free browsers, thinks to record it for our own use later on.
I wish I could show you the link. But i cannot search my history and i did not bookmark it. :-(
I don't think this is reasonable at all.
This was also a way for me to learn about browser plugins, to integrate a bookmark button in the browser's toolbar.
I intend to make it a public service at some point. For anyone interested : https://bmlite.net (most minimalst MVP ever :)) (I have ipv6 issues at the moment, sorry about connection issues)
In practice, I found that by the time I would return to them (often years later), I frequently lost the context and the page went offline. So now I will typically instead paste the URL into an organized series of text file notes on various subjects, sometimes including a short summary of what interested me, a quote, or both. Even if I don't add a short note, I find that the categorization is more specific in the text file than the bookmarks, which helps contextualize the webpage. I'll also often either save the page to my hard drive or save it in Zotero, choosing the latter if I think I might cite it in a paper in the future.
I haven't stopped using bookmarks, but the bookmarks I have now are more ephemeral. I still sometimes fall into my old habits and use some bookmark folders for non-ephemeral things, but I've been getting better about this over the years. If it's in my bookmarks, it's probably not as important as what's in my text files.
A few years back, I did make a concerted effort to transfer as many of my bookmarks to text files as possible as well. I probably deleted over half of them in this process.
According to grep, I have approximately 43,957 URLs saved in my text files...
This has been my way of doing it for some years. Usually end up writing a blog-ish sort of shorthand in sublime text with some thoughts and perspective to prime my later self on what I was thinking and why it caught my attention. Usually leave a few hanging questions for followup as well.
https://app.getpocket.com/
I have 10/15 bookmarks in the top toolbar that are releant to my work. All the rest goes into limbo, and I don't even bookmark much anymore.
When needed, I write notes (wiki, or paper) with links contextualized by topic/need.
The problem with bookmarks is those 3 together (that are required for bookmarks to be of any usefulness - to me anyway):
1) it's easy to create one, there should be more friction;
2) it's hard to have a long-term storage/indexing system (Delicious & equivalents were a good direction);
3) it requires a custom setup for bookmark search to be integrated.
Also, in the mid-term, most URLs are broken.
A paper notebook, on the other hand:
1) requires a conscious effort to note something done (and to have around also);
2) is relatively a secure & long term storage; it's discoverable;
3) the effort marks a memory inprint that helps indexing in long term memory, just for the "I remember I noted that down somewhere when I was in...".
My offline bookmarks/notes/snippets/activities feel way more productive and fulfilling than the computer-based ones in the long-term.
The latter has never really worked for me, so the heavyweight approach is to have a why-justified system. If you're going to save a bookmark, it had better be referred to in some checklist or documentation attached to a long-term project that you are actively working on, and that you've sufficiently justified as being a necessary part of your long term goals or values. In other words, any bookmark worth saving should be able to be attached to some sort of actionable tactic.
And as part of that, all of these projects (and bookmarks) need to be actively reviewed. If you aren't regularly reviewing them, then just delete them.
Right now it works, albeit not perfectly and is available for Chrome only. I recently open sourced the whole thing and plan to release a Firefox version as well.
Check it out if you are interested:
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fav-bookmark-manag...
Github: https://github.com/sgolovine/fav.sh
Of course, it sounds like we have different filters. You said you add a bookmark when you "saw something cool". I only add bookmarks that I believe will have a positive impact on the things I do in my life. There is new cool stuff online every day... I personally let most of it go by, because there will be something else tomorrow.
Linkdrop doesn't have any unread article lists. When you "save" an article, it queues it up to send it to you in an email the next day.
Since I've been using it I find that my actual bookmarks are things I want to save instead of just random articles. Makes things a lot cleaner :)
It's got a good number of users atm and things are running smoothly, it's also free. If you do use it, feel free to send me any feedback you have. I've been trying to find more time to hack on it and would love some more direction.
The benefit of org-mode (or any plaintext bookmarking) is that it makes it instantly searchable in my emacs. I accept that I probably will never have time to properly read through everything I clipped. But it works as a personal search engine: when I search for some topic/tool/etc., I run into some related stuff that I already clipped. It has higher information quality than googling it because my past self already found it interesting and curated these pieces of information. I describe my setup for searching in emacs here: [0].
Another benefit of org-mode is that I can add tags, notes and basically treat bookmarks as any other piece of knowledge I keep in my org-mode files.
Basically, I only use browser bookmarks for services (i.e. social networks/dashboards/etc) now. If it's some sort of knowledge or anything interesting, it gets clipped into org-mode.
For clipping pages into org-mode I tried using org-protocol [1] for bookmarking straight into org-mode; it was unreliable for me, so I wrote my own extension [2]
And finally, I'm working on a browser extension [3], that would unify 'bookmarks' and browsing history from anywhere, whether they are youtube lists/github stars/twitter likes/IM messages or even plaintext files on your filesystem
[0] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#personal_information
[1] https://github.com/sprig/org-capture-extension
[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html
[3] https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#demo
It was a markdown file full of links, organized by a category, sometimes accompanied by a short comment. A never-ending backlog of articles, papers, videos, past live streams, blogs, and Hacker News threads that I will presumably come back one day.
I no longer save bookmarks and I no longer get a pressing urge to clear my backlog.
Recently, I have published a single HTML page on my personal website (ironically, called bookmarks.html) with a half-dozen of links that I found particularly remarkable. But the purpose here is to share good stuff with folks rather than look at it later when I have more time.
I'm also a bit allergic to using some external service to do this -- that seems like a pointless loss of control to me.
(I use Online Bookmarks http://www.frech.ch/online-bookmarks/ for this)
I store articles as Markdown (there are online converters that take a URL and extract the Markdown, e.g. http://fuckyeahmarkdown.com) with some manual cleanup. It's a bit expensive, which means that I only do it for stuff that I really really want to keep. I have about two dozen things in that folder by now.
And then it happened again with Reddit. Same thing: I save an interesting comment or post, and then never see it again. I sometimes go back to get a specific comment, but it takes forever to find it. So my solution was to make it some type of game. I find time every month to just attack those saved posts and comments, and check them out 1 by 1. Some of them are either videos that I couldn't watch at the time, or articles I thought I should read later. I watched the videos, read the articles, and then unsaved the posts. If their is a post I think there is a big chance I'll go back to again, I'll keep it saved.
After took me a couple of sessions to go through all my backlog, but after every session, I learn so much, probably laugh a lot as well, and my bookmarks are kept to an absolute minimum.
So yeah, no extension will help you, I'm sure more than half of your bookmarks are a one time read, many are also not interesting to you anymore, and those you really want to keep are less than a hundred.
I used to be a heavy Delicious user before it went away.
To summarize: 1. Chrome Bookmarks 2. Workona 3. Notion 4. Native Bookmark Sources (e.g. HN, Stack Overflow, Twitter)
The large bookmark library you are talking about lives in layer 3, Notion. I too have issues with its Web Clipper. However, I came to realize that it is a very good habit anyway to manually curate recently added bookmarks. I do it about twice a month and usually, I can throw out a good portion of the new additions because they do not seem quite as relevant on second look. The big advantage of having your bookmarks library in Notion is that you can relate to other databases in Notion, e.g. projects, blog posts, ideas.
Another important lesson: Be careful not to do too much bookmarking. A large library can feel overwhelming and most things can be easily found again with a simple google search.
[1] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...
Long: After many years of many systems, I now use FF bookmarks on desktop as my base for managing and organizing. A few months ago I pared down my collection significantly but still have a few thousand links. I only sync across FF using the built-in sync. Used Xmarks previously for Chrome/FF/Safari but that got too complicated and broke once they shut the service down. If I need to sync elsewhere I can just export from FF.
I utilize the built-in "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder for work/frequently accessed pages. I have a "To Sort" subfolder in there for bookmarks that I still need to categorize. I make folders for things that I'm researching or articles I want to read on desktop.
In the main "Bookmarks Menu" I have about 25 folders for different subject areas like Business/Employment/Money, Design, Development, Travel, etc. I have one folder where I keep track of accounts I have logins to. I have a "Buy" folder with a few different subfolders of brands or stores that I like.
Finally, there's a "Mobile Bookmarks" folder that contains bookmarks saved on FF iOS. This makes it easy to save things quickly on iOS and organize later on desktop. If you use Safari on iOS you can easily bookmark in FF by clicking the share button, selecting FF iOS (must be installed) and choosing "Bookmark This Page". You don't even have to exit Safari :)
In general I bookmark because I like curating all these unique areas of my internet life. I like having a list of personally vetted links that I can go back to when I need them, after my brain has moved on and my browser history has been cleared.
Hope it serves you well
My main use case was to have a single place for all my bookmarks across Android, iOS, OS X and Linux, and across Firefox and Chrome.
Among all the solutions I evaluated, Raindrop.io had the best UX at the time.
Manually tagging everything ... is tedious.
The inability to search content of bookmarks, or even, often to find the original content online (praise His Noodliness for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine), is a major impediment.
Reading (and using) research tools which do allow and facilitate use, not merely archival, of references, is a complete game-changer, and makes clear that much of the present organisational conceit of Web content is highly flawed, with assumptions based on 20- 30-year-old system limitations, when disk was scarce, storage expensive, and local search difficult at best.
The focus of most vendors -- both proprietary and nominally free software -- around user-surveillance, tracking, and cloud-based platforms facilitating both, means that usable, user-controlled, local (or at least proximate) solutions ... are poorly developed, supported, and advertised (irony noted).
There are some. I'm encouraged by the mentions of projects in this thread. Pinboard, Pocket, Wallabag, and other options have some use.[1]
I still think the area's ripe for drastic improvement.
________________________________
Notes.
1. I make heavy use of Pocket. I remain largely disappointed,[2] though there's a recent Android client rewrite I'm meaning to try.
2. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...
I think this offers the exact same thing as the popular pinboard but it's free !
https://github.com/maciejjankowski/2020/wiki/Jan
good things: it is stored as a markdown file for each month, it is a github repository, so it can be edited either online or in text editor, it is quite easy to search it using command line tools or 'find in folder' option from text editor
missing features - tags, longer descriptions
bookmarklet code: https://gist.github.com/maciejjankowski/312800dd22fbd8cd8f07...
[1] https://getmemex.com/
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...
http://www.gettoby.com/
I find it has some tiny glitches with drag and dropping to rearrange, but otherwise it's free and works pretty well.
I think of Gwern's https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs
Which gets part of the way to having a full index, and gives you offline searchability.
As noname120 mentioned, the "memex" extension indexes what you read, but I found the slowdown from indexing work interfered with normal browsing too much for me. Maybe batched, or manually triggered, indexing would work for me.
1. If I find something that looks interesting, but I don't know why or for what, I bookmark it and put it in a bookmark folder "To Read" in order to read later.
2. For things where there is a specific need it addresses (e.g., is relevant to a project I'm working on), I usually have one or more design docs going for each project I work on, and the link gets dropped into the reference section of the doc. That way, I can find it easily in the context of the thing I'm trying to do, and when I share the doc with others, they also will know where I'm coming from with my ideas.
Installer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archiveror/
Repo: https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror
I have a couple of thousand bookmarks, which as some might say is a ridiculous amount. Except they aren't really bookmarks in the strict sense. For me they are webpages that contain useful information. Some bookmarks don't get opened for years but I know that if I ever need information on compiling SBCL I can click the tags 'sbcl' and 'compilers'. Searching the internet for that exact article probably wouldn't get me what I found 4 years ago.
The actual browser bookmarks, with stuff that has proven itself useful and I end up searching for it at least a handful of times a year.
Notion Web Clipper to dump everything else on a "need to organize" file on Notion.
A couple times a month I go into the "need to organize" file, read anything that was there as a "read later" and remove them, simply remove anything that looking back doesnt seem like will be useful on the next year, and move everything else and then categorize/add tags to a "useful links" file also on Notion.
Before Notion I've used Pocket similarly.
I agree with monkeynotes that you have to be mindful on how much time you spend collecting bookmarks, I felt consumed at one point and unproductive because you skim, you save, and you find other links to the original link you are saving. Probably set a time limit to how long you spend.
I heard an old trick to avoid overspending. Bookmark an item, and look back in a week. If you still want it, buy it!
I don't have that overspending problem, but I find it applies well to bookmarks. I clear it out once a week, it's a very fun chore. Looking back with a fresh mind, many things are not interesting to me, and those things that are, I can invest time in to look at.
Useful looking tools or programs, I usually file away permanently to another bookmark, because I find myself looking back there many months later :)
Please reach out to me (contact info in my profile) as I have a side project I would like to resurrect that tackles these same issues.
I use the basic .js bookmarklet in Firefox to add links quickly, no addons or extensions required. Android app is OK but I uninstalled it after not using it for a long time.
What stays in my mind :
1. Try to not use bookmarks for long terms. Keep useful information in a personal wiki, website, ... It's probably the best way to remember information and to be able to refind them when needed.
2. If you still need to use bookmarks, there are lots of custom tools. I checked all of your submission and there is some very nice stuff. It all depends on your use on how you use bookmarks :)
I like how Toby allows organizing bookmarks per session. I'm gonna give a try to this tool, but with a limited number of bookmark.
Every bookmark you create is a time commitment at a later date. The more you have, the less time you have available at any later point in time.
It's great (again).
I have around 3.5k bookmarks, sloppily tagged, and it's such a great resource to have.
Now that he's again paying attention to his service, I haven't had issues again.
I ended up creating folders to manage my workflow GTD-style. It turns out everything in my life has a URL.
- START (Workspace, Email, Calendar)
- INBOX (Random things that come up)
- TODO (Next Actions)
- PROJECTS (Things that can't be done in one step. One subfolder for each)
- OFTEN (Reference, Documentation, Utils etc)
- LATER (Anything I want to read later, I empty this every couple of months. This is just a procrastination busting hack)
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/
Searched and parsed with Alfred workflow.
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind
The bookmarks are links under ## Links heading of any markdown file. Here are few with some links
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/programming-languages/go
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/programming-languages/go/go-...
https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/machine-learning
There is lots more. Around 16,000 lines of markdown in the wiki now. Writing the code to meaningfully parse it now.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nikitavoloboev/status/12165452379...
Here are all the topics included in the wiki. Enough to learn for a life time.
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/SUMM...
Oh and the wiki of course does not include private links. Those live in my main browser (Safari) and are searched with workflow too.
https://github.com/deanishe/alfred-safari-assistant
And I optimized the top sites to be most popular pages I visit to get my news on mobile. Accessed by opening new tab.
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-ios/blob/master/README....
On mac I go as far as binding certain sites to open with a single key using Karabiner. ie pressing b + n opens https://hckrnews.com
https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...
It lets me add links into different collections easily and I can even share those collections with other people if I want. It's really nice to be able to just share a collection of links when someone ask for something. Ex. I have a nice collection of recipes that I can just share out when someone ask me for a recipe for something.
Usually if the info is somewhat important to me, I'll copy the snippet I need into a notebook (Joplin, I use tags there as well), and also send a request to archive the page on the Wayback Machine as a safeguard, so I can search that URL there later on if needed.
The hardest part is to categorize and tag the content correctly so that you don't spend a lot of time searching.
I don't use the web browser bookmarks for "keeping" anything. Web browsers have a tendency to "misplace" them for all sorts of reasons. Brave on ios recently destroyed all my favorites I had on the empty tab screen when I recently applied an update. Glad I had them in my journal.
Project related bookmarks go in a file associated with that project.
https://LearnAwesome.org
It's FOSS, of-course.
My philosophy is that the bookmarks toolbar is for "tools" and things I want myself to visit more often (a page for a good habit or a project)
Other bookmarks are split into basic categories like "Media" (A/V content), "Vintage" (old/nostalgia websites), "Games" & etc.
Bookmark Folder : Description
Files : Browser based files I want easy access to. These are generally static pages or anything I do data entry into (google drive docs, flowcharts). Things I could feasibly download a copy of.
Reports : Dynamic pages that let me get a measurement on something
HowTo : I often google how to do something, and when i find a result that i actually use it goes in here
Tools : Web tools, like JSON pretty print. These are pages that provide an automatic service of some kind (i.e input / output processes)
Index : Informational Directories. Examples include Code of federal regulations, RFC pages, interesting / useful wiki articles, cheat sheets, comprehensive guides that go beyond "howto", repositories, etc
Reading : Blog posts, case studies, technical writings, articles, things meant to be part of a conversation or a showcase
Communities : Social home pages that are mostly already bookedmarked into my finger tips like HN, reddit, stack overflow, facebook, etc
Learning : Items that still need to be 'digested'. Stuff from here is often moved to other folders after I am done with it.
Misc : (a word i only like to use once, if at all, in organizing). Basically, if all i do is take a glance at something and want to come back to it later - it goes in here
Each of these main folders denote mutually exclusive types of content (imo). Within each of these folders I create subfolders as needed to group things together by topic.
Add-ons
Additionally, I use a tab manager add-on. Currently I use "Cluster" for google chrome but I am looking into switching to TabXpert. When multiple sets of pages form a cohesive context, I save that context as a collection of tabs. For example, if I am working on an analytics project I may have various HowTo's, documentation, files, and Learning tabs open that are all related to my project. I save that window, and then instead of digging through ALL my book marks I can keep a running session of relevant pages. Some of which I know are only relevant for the project and do not need to be bookmarked.
When I start a new project, I collect relevant pages from my existing bookmarks into a new context.
It's a self hosted web application. I host it on my homelab server. It will also archive the bookmarks so you can view them offline. FireFox and Google Chrome addons are available too. You can also import bookmarks from Pocket.
Although now I do a more low-key approach, just storing them in a flat list and for current topics that interest me I create folders. My "focus interests" change quite rapidly so I don't care about archiving anymore.
I currently have 4319 links, collected over 13 years and 8 days (started with Delicious, then Pinboard).
Link rot and relevance is an issue, and I rarely go back to links that are more than a year old.
I don't delete broken links though, I like to think my Shaarli is a fair representation of my interests over the years.
I recently developed a Shaarli extension for Ulauncher. [0]
[0] https://ext.ulauncher.io/-/github-sebw-ulauncher-shaarli
I'm often on trips for a few days to a couple of weeks, and I only need to shift back and forth between my laptop and desktop.
If I find something interesting on the phone, I just look it up later on a computer to save the bookmark.
- Church: (links I frequently use related to my religion, such as the tithing payment portal and shared Google docs)
- STB: (stuff to buy) stuff I want to buy eventually but aren't immediate priority and stuff I think I want to buy.
- STB House: (inside the STB folder) stuff I want to purchase for a house when I purchase a house. Fiance and I plan to start looking as soon as she has an employment contract here (teacher).
Then I keep a few things on the bookmark toolbar not in a folder: uvere login portal, the YouTube subscriptions page, my HRA portal, Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, my training log (strength athlete).
That's it. I simply don't bookmark anything else anymore. If I want to reference something later, and think it will be in the near future, I leave it open in a tab.
If I want to save something for possible future reference I clip the page/article to Evernote and tag it how my brain works. Frequently this is Wiki entries (that get archived as the wikiwand version) and lengthy articles/blog posts. This actually makes the content useful as I can search an idea/topic in the future and find relevant stuff.
When I find a non-fiction kindle title useful, I open it in Calibre and print it to PDF, I then add the PDF to Evernote as well and tag it accordingly.
For dynamic content I save a bookmark, but for various articles and posts I can save the whole readable content which is nice, because otherwise if I want to follow up a five year old bookmark there's a good chance that it's gone now.
Seriously though, I can't believe it's 2020 and browser makers haven't updated the way bookmarks are saved, they should have had search functionality years ago...
Anything thats "read later" goes to pocket.
Everything else just gets googled.
Edit: I mostly ignore mobile but I created https://smscp.xyz/ which I use to transfer text snippets such as URLs if I care enough.
I keep it extremely slim and only add if I'm going to it a lot. If I find something cool, I generally email it to myself or put it in a draft email full of links with topics next to it.
Browsing my youtube playlist library I can see that bookmarking is not enough if the link dies after a couple years.
1. Collect in Pocket 2. On a new add to Pocket trigger a Zapier task to Summarize it 3. Summarize the item in MakeMySummary https://www.makemysummary.com. Although this is optional, i find it easier to have some sense of the item i bookmarked without reading/viewing it fully. And i built it in my spare time to solve this exact problem. 4. On Summary done, Zapier will make a Todoist Task for me to review at a later time
Added benefit with Pocket is its searchable, so if and when i need, i can look up something i bookmarked. Google links expire as several noted in the comments.
Subject line: 1/24/2019 Rk Digest Body: all the links, plus a description
Not the most efficient, but gets the job done for now. Thinking of a better way to do it, perhaps some sort of digital garden.
This means on the off chance that I get some time to go thru the backlog, I can tackle a single month and still feel like I made progress.
But I haven't found anything better. I don't want to use a 3rd party closed-source apps, so it limits my options.
I have an Instapaper account but I almost never use it.
[0] Stackkup.com
One column for the url another for notes. I have about 10 sheets organized by topic. I click on the xhtml file and it opens in the browser and my links are all there.
Very flexible, easy.
instead I've been using Microsoft OneNote
I can group the bookmarks in a few different ways (Notebooks > Sections > Pages > block within page) but more importantly I can write some notes about the link and why it is interesting and how it relates to other links in the same topic I've saved
the things I like about OneNote are: it's free, works ok, and syncs between macOS desktop app and Android app
On browsers I bookmark pages I want to come back to, but it's usually like 3-5 bookmarks before i wipe the browser completely again.
https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial
2. Folders of topic/ project specific info pages.
3. 'Reading List' Chrome extension for one offs and things I want to come back to.
Biannual pruning of the folders.
https://github.com/oriansj/orgmode-bookmarks
The biggest problem with bookmarks is pages that don't have descriptive titles.
* At the very least, I just need a text file with a dump of links * More interesting would be something more useful like a database with titles, comments, maybe even saved copies of pages * Most awesome would be my own, simple, html home network website where I can navigate my bookmarks visually, have search, etc.
Any suggestions for making this process easier would be very welcome
Create directories?
https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public
Unfortunately opening this now `file://///bookmarks.html` doesn't allow loading the resource as a security issue. So I've exported all my bookmarks and deleted them.
I have the old history for reference, but I've just decided not to bookmark in the future.
I hardly bookmark sites that don't contain articles for reading.
* random items in Google Keep
* Instapaper
* Pocket
I am not proud of this. The last time I felt under control is when I used del.icio.us.
The tldr is it maps urls to key words / phrases that we input. Those mappings go into a shared list, using the browser extension you can then search for them in the browser bar.
We tend to plow in tons of stuff, some of which we may never use, but countless times I've bashed in a phrase out of pure hope and found a team member or me in the past have added the resource in.
Lists are a bit like repos, you can have private ones just for you or you can share them, and they can all be searched at the same time.
It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's free at the moment for non-enterprises.
Examples:
Was it to do with climate change? Check the emails to my sister.
Was it some geeky thing? Check the emails to my brother.
Was it to do with teaching? Check the hyperlinks list that I created in MS Word (Outline view).
Was it ego-boosting? Check my HN comments.
Was it to do with other interests, such as shares, bridge, Twitch, solar, …? Check my Chrome folders.
Was it political, e.g. Trump? Check my MS Edge browser bookmarks.
Was it software related? Check my Facebook "Saved" list.
Was it biology-themed? Check my Facebook posts.
Is it a link needed daily? Make it a shortcut on my Edge/Chrome start-up page.
This gives a number of categories that are easily remembered, because of the emotional connections, and can be readily searched.
Lastly, I mostly use Chrome, because if I don't explicitly save a recent interest, I can quickly find it with Chrome's History (Ctrl-H).