I have started doing something completely different than using bookmarks. I set up yacy[1] on a personal, internal server at my home, which I can access from all my devices, since they are always on my wireguard vpn.
Yacy is actually a distributed search engine, but I run in 'Robinson mode' as a private peer, to keep it isolated, as I just want a personal search of only sites I have indexed.
Anytime I come across something of interest, I index it with yacy, using a a depth of 0 (since I only want to index that one page, not the whole site). This way, I can just go to my search site, and search for something, and anything related that I've indexed before pops up. I found this works way better than trying to manage bookmarks with descriptions and tags.
Also, yacy will keep a cache of the content which is great if the site ever goes offline or changes.
If I need to browse, I can go use yacy's admin tools to see all the urls I have indexed.
I have been using this for several months and I am using this way more than I ever used my bookmarks.
This is great, and is something I've wanted for a while. I use pinboard which is supposed to have similar capabilities (click 'search full text', 'search mine' after turning on and paying for 'archiving'), but I've never been totally confident in it (pages would change, and the cached version was updated to a 404 page), and ended up letting my archiving subscription lapse.
I think google used to offer something that did this as well as search all your local files, but I think that went the way of all gThings.
That does look pretty cool, and unusually for a SaaS has chosen a pricing I think is reasonable for the service (not everything should be $9 a month!).
Do you know if it does pdfs? That's a key thing I want in this kind of service.
> Google Desktop was a computer program with desktop search capabilities, created by Google for Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows systems. It allowed text searches of a user's email messages, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and the ability to display "Google Gadgets" on the user's desktop in a Sidebar.
Google desktop was so great. It’s also weird how bad windows search and Mac search sucks.
Google desktop was able to find files anywhere in milliseconds. Still today if I search for a file on windows it takes many seconds and frequently misses the file. And there’s an indexing service that seems to peg my cpu every once in a while.
This is Mac only and I have no affiliation other than I like this developer but your request reminded me that he just launched this app: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-history-book
That’s a really genius idea. I also like the author’s pricing mode. I was fearing some stupid “$10 is just the price of coffee. This is worth 24 coffees a year for the rest of your life” and have a reasonable $7 purchase price.
who the fuck is starbucks' market if a daily coffee costs over $2000 each year (assuming you do a 5-day workweek and throwing two months off the year to account for days when you don't get morning coffee from starbucks)
you have to be swimming in money
that makes me doubt that anyone would pay more than $2-4 and even that's overpriced as hell
I have wished for a while that browser would store the entire page of any bookmark you save automatically, and put a decent search engine on it. I wrote a script once to do it for my bookmarks, and it didn't even take that much space on my hard drive.
Your system could be a Firefox addon, kinda like what scrapbook used to be, but automatic. Even with a note system, and storing metadata, Zotero style, but without the need for the dual setup.
How mozzilla is not pursuing that kind of innovation in Firefox itself is beyond me. Instead they continously try to ape the Chrome UI and collect telemetry without permission so that they can give you "exciting" "new" features like colorways.
It would also be nice to be able to search through my aggregated browsing history on every device I use.
Maybe I should open a feature request to Google/Fracebook to provide an API hook for that, since they probably already have all that information anyway.
This. I wonder if there is a way to direct my searches first to the domains I have ever visited. Oftentimes I will search for something that I am sure I’ve hit before but can vaguely remember which result set it was that scored my search.
This is insane! Thanks for recommendation! Was able to set it up relatively quickly and now have a personal search of all the things that I find interesting, this is insane!
How does the process of bookmarking goes then? meaning, how hard is it to add something to crawl with depth0 on a day to day. Can it be done with a bookmarklet?
me too, when I first used delicious I was hoping that individual curators could provide a more in-depth "meta search" engine! Pocket is not bad, it provides some interesting links to new stuff on the web.
I really liked this setup. The only point of friction for me was adding the links to the index via the crawler everytime. So I created a Firefox Extenstion to do it directly from the address-bar.
Thanks for this recommendation! Do you only index things with a depth of 0? I just set Yacy up a couple days after seeing this post, and didn't realize what that meant at first.
Now I have 10s of 1000s of pages indexed after importing my bookmarks/history, and I'm wondering if it'd be more useful to _only_ index the pages I've visited/bookmarked, or if it'd also be good to crawl those sites further.
I guess one distinction would be whether or not I thought I could use Yacy as a full-time replacement for google/ddg. It'd be nice if I could index "everything", but then have a toggle to search only my bookmarks/history or something similar to that.
I have 3 tech related subscriptions; BorgBase, JetBrains, and historio.us. I self-host everything, but I've never found anything that replaces historio.us. It indexes just enough to always get me a complete copy of the data I want cached and the search results are just right. I often have about 1 page of search results when I'm looking for old info and I can pick out the page I'm looking for instantly.
I use it a lot when I'm learning something new. As I'm looking for beginner info I'll often find more advanced stuff that I'd like to try or learn at some point, but I don't have a good enough understanding to know if it's truly useful info. I historify those sites and move on knowing that I can find it in my historio.us search at a later date.
I also reference cached pages in a lot of my personal docs. I recently started using ArchiveBox for that, but the search doesn't make it a good replacement for the above use case.
I've been using historio.us since 2011 (!) and have never found anything to replace it. Great job!
Some UI feedback: I went to check out https://historio.us/ and on my macbook air I saw the top of the green button "see our plans". Took me a couple of clicks until I realized I had to scroll down to click the real "plans and pricing" button that was off my screen.
That sounds really cool. How difficult is this to set up?
How confident are you that this will keep your bookmarks safe? Losing indexed data might not be such a big concern for a search engine that is intended to re-index everything continuously.
I defnitely felt betrayed when I found out that Firefox automatically deletes old history :/ I guess they think that most users need to trash their profile to fix some obscure bug before that anyway...
Yes, it does automatically keep a cache from when it indexed the site. I have it set to not automatically recrawl sites, so the cache is from when I added the site.
I'd love to hear more about how you set all this up, particularly, do you have some sort of extension or bookmarklet that submits the current page to yacy's crawler?
Nice! I’ve been working on and off on a similar idea (searchable index of link contents) as a cli app eventually web web frontend. It’s on Python so packaging has been an issue.
I have tried many different solutions the last two decades, but none of of them really stuck or became useful over time. I kinda gave up and as a last ditch effort started to do the simplest thing I could think of: ctrl+D to add bookmarks in Firefox, jotting down a few keywords on each entry. No folders, no structure, just a flat list and some keywords.
A few months in I noticed how powerful this simple system was. When talking with someone else about a tool, github-repo or article I had seen but did no remember the name or title of, finding it back was suddenly a breeze. Since I keep my desktop and mobile bookmarks in sync, it it just a matter of typing in a keword in the address bar in firefox and it shows up instantly!
On desktop, you can limit the search to bookmarks only by starting with a *, which is helpful to avoid browser history etc.
I have really low bar for adding a bookmark now as the mental overhead is so low and it is done notime. It has become the second brain I always wanted :)
I also do this, but I don't like my browser cluttered up with thousands of accumulated bookmarks, many of which I don't return to. So I export them every month, delete the embedded favicons, and then wipe. If I want to find something I just grep for it.
I use Firefox bookmarks too and sync so new devices are easy to setup. The "Bookmark search plus 2" add on allows you to search folder names and shows which folder a bookmark is stored in.
Reasons:
1. Archives - those tutorials and guides stay when the original pages go 404
2. API - I use the api to automatically post my bookmarks to my blog
3. Full-text search: this is very very useful when needed
4. Social Discovery: Search that niche website / app on Pinboard. It shows lots of other people who found that same thing as interesting. We can then follow them and subscribe to their favourites as RSS feed.
I’ve been a Pinboard customer since 2010 and I subscribed to the archival service several years. But archival seems to have stopped on my account. I think I emailed once but never received a reply (which I’ve heard is common). I love the philosophy of Pinboard and I also like Maciej. That said I recently decided to roll my own bookmarks tool with Wayback Machine archival capability.
Archival hasn't been working for months for me and nobody answers the mails (I've tried three times over the last year or so) so as much as I like pinboard.in at the moment I am looking for something else
Same. Having imported my delicious bookmarks dating back to 2005 or so, I have a fairly large set of links that I try to tag consistently. I don't actually read a ton of them, but being able to full-text search or filter by combining tags makes it really useful for digging up things I barely remember coming across.
I love Pinboard. It has all the features I'd expect from a bookmarking service, but nothing superfluous. There's no upsell. There's no advertisement or JavaScript bloat.
Part of the reason for Pinboard's success is the lack of VC pressure for growth. I'm happy to keep paying for Pinboard indefinitely.
I use pinboard as well. Early user of del.icio.us, I exported it all to pinboard and paid a one-time lifetime fee. Too many old links are dead, but that's the nature of the web, and I hope waybackmachine can help with some of them (I never paid for the full-text-archive feature of pinboard, it would have been a good idea but it's too late now). Sometimes it definitely helps me find some old highlights that still lurk in a shiny way in my mind.
Pinboard is phenomenal. I used to keep all my links in Simplenote but Pinboard is far superior for a number of the reasons listed here already. I may only search through it for something once a week but I find I tag things much more thoroughly in Pinboard than anything else I've used.
I just became a Pinboard customer a few months ago!
I picked Pinboard because the UI is simple but functional. No 30mb blob of JavaScript. It pairs well with todo.txt… now I just need a simple Dropbox-based notes app to complete the trio.
I also continue to use Pinboard, for much the same reasons. Since 2010! I don't use the social features but it's nice to have a tool that's been constant and reliable for over a decade.
My incredibly unsophisticated, but surprisingly effective approach, is to share by email with myself (e.g. mail to myname+bookmark@mydomain.com).
Mail rules can then file them, I can add any relevant notes or hashtags to the mail body at the time I share the link, and the chronological ordering is helpful. Imap search is usually 'good enough' to turn up a half-remembered link or article.
I have been meaning to add an imap script to complement this with something like a simplepage archive, but have never got round to it.
Forlater means the same in Norwegian as well. Not having been back to Norway for years due to COVID I guess I'm getting a bit rusty and missed that one :p
Scenario, if I save a link from HackerNews, I like to save the submission of it as well. I wonder if I send a HackerNews link to forlater.email; it can parse the article and remind me I got it from HackerNews.
It was meaningful to me. To me it meant "the other options are better for me, but I'll take payment in btc if that's the best option for you. Here's the link for that"
I dropped pinboard.in recently. The interface hasn't had improvements in years, the extensions are all third party, and the API if you wanted to build your own is pretty limiting. The mobile interface is pretty poor too.
I'm now moved over the Raindrop.io[1], which is another solo-developer outfit, but has had a lot of work put into it. It does all the same stuff Pinboard does (including page archiving but beside the social and public directory things... which nobody uses), but has a bunch of additional features. It has a much more complete API, a well maintained extension, and mobile apps! Definitely worth giving a go.
I've been paying for Raindrop for a few years and its organisation capabilities are really good: tags, collections, folders, search, etc. All in a quite polished UI!
Agreed it's much better service, I've been really enjoying it.
One feature I recently learned was Highlights [1]
You can select a passage of text on the page, then when bookmarked, it'll save the selected text. Allows for multiple highlights. And then visiting the page in the future those texts clips will then be highlighted again.
I use Raindrop.io and have it hooked up to NewsBlur and ArchiveBox as secondary backups [1].
This way whenever something is bookmarked it's saved in Newsblur and published to Dropbox, which ArchiveBox picks up every hour and saves a local copy and to archive.org.
Pinboard is still quite active. If you need proof just go to /recent which is a live firehose and interesting to see what people are bookmarking. I use Pinboard and regularly export my bookmarks incase their servers are hacked/wiped/corrupted.
I pay to keep the servers running, not so I can have something new and shiny every month. If it somehow quits doing what pinboard does, then I'll look at alternatives.
Exactly, I hate the idea that software has to be constantly updated. That's how we end up with so many bloated messes that started out simple (cough dropbox cough). Pinboard is simple, and for my needs at least, perfect. If he kept it in maintenance mode forever, I'd be fine with that.
Part of it is definitely that Pinboard as a service (feels to be at least) is in "maintenance mode" with minimal support. But what new features does a bookmarking service need?
Part of it is also that tech bros are upset that Maciej didn't go full-coinbase and is instead pretty active socially/politically.
I'm happy to keep using it and paying for it. Works fine for my needs.
I am not a techbro (not from a tech field) and I don’t want new features, only that the ones it has not stop working. Especially when I am paying for it.
That actually reminds me I haven't done an export in a looong time and I should.
I was using Magnolia before Pinboard and it went down permanently. Fortunately, at the time, I was doing link blog posts once or twice a week so I was able to recover most of my links with a bit of work.
I use Zotero for this now. I have a bunch of sub-collections (e.g. technical, interesting, fitness, etc.) and when I see a webpage I like I use the plug-in to save to Zotero. Better than a bookmark because it also saves a snapshot of the webpage, and, I can easily cite it if I'm writing a document.
Same. I don't even use the citation features of Zotero, it's purely a bookmark manager for me. I can choose whether to save the page with or without a snapshot, use both folders and tags for organization, add notes if I want to, and on supported sites (like Github), get an automatic bookmark summary too.
The interface took a bit of getting used to, but I learned some of the shortcuts, installed Zutilo [1], and ultimately just accepted the fact that I'll have to use the mouse for some things, as everything else about the program makes it worth it.
Do you or anyone else have thoughts on if Zotero would be too much for someone who doesn't need to write papers or cite documents? A large component of my day-to-day work is doing a lot of research and managing it for the duration of the project.
I highly recommend it, even for this use case. It takes a bit to get used to in how it works and setting so that it works well for your given workflow. For example, I'm a latex user so I had to add extensions to zotero so it can output to bibtex. But again, it wasn't that bad. Once its set up and you used it a few times, it easy and super useful.
I use it not only for web bookmarks, but as my main 'library' for all my documents. Even random scanned docs or even funny gifs I will store in zotero because I can tag them and put in notes so they are easy to find later.
Yep, constantly. That's how I use it instead of bookmarks. It also has extra functionality for certain cites like google scholar to make it easier to save journal and conference papers.
I have the pocket extension installed in chrome. Not so much because I actually refer back to the things I have added to it but so that when I have wayyyy too many tabs open I can click the "add to pocket" button on a few of them and not agonize about closing them.
Do you pay for pocket or use the free tier? I hadn't heard of pocket before, but am looking at it... it's not clear to me what is limited in free tier/what the difference is. "Permanent library of everything you’ve saved" is listed as a feature of only the premium paid tier, leading me to wonder if that means your saved things disappear from the free tier after a certain amount of time?
I pay for the premium tier. I've been disappointed by their promises about content being retained forever. There's a big caveat that they don't actually keep paywalled content forever. This is annoying because I might save something that's not paywalled right now, highlight it, then come back a year later and I can't get to my highlights anymore. And they've been extremely unreliable in being able to retrieve all of my content from searching. Articles I'm positive I've saved routinely don't appear in my searches. There's some sort of caching going on where they don't include articles I haven't recently interacted with and they haven't been able to fix it for 3+ years. I really want to like Pocket but they just fail in this important use case for me.
Exact same, Pocket is so close to being the perfect service and yet so far. I have a huge archive and their search is just terrible. I will have a specific keyword from an article I know I have in there, and yet all I get from their results is utterly irrelevant articles. Making it worse, you can't filter the search results to, say, your Favorites, so I have to sift through all the random crap in my full archive.
Yeah I really hate this. And they've had just stupidly obvious bugs to fix for so long. For instance, in the web client their logic for handling quotes is broken. So you literally can't search for an "exact match" (even though Pocket anyway sucks at exact matches), you just get """"my search term"""" with 4 quotes that returns either 0 or 1000 results. I can't fathom how this particular bug could be more than a one-line fix in the HTML escape logic.
same. Have a premium account but their search doesn't work properly. At one point I asked their support and they switched my account from premium to non-premium, asked me to pay for another premium account (which they then refunded). Then it was working properly for some months, but now it's having problems again. So annoying...
If they were to make the copy available for everyone through their own syndicator then sure, but they don't. The "copy" is only available for the original reader, who had legitimate access to the original anyway.
Under copyright, you're allowed to make full copies of works which you have legitimate access to, as long as you don't distribute them to others.
Same here, but I've started tagging certain kinds of links. I haven't used the tags much, except to look up recipes, so it remains to be seen how much mileage I'll get out of the tages, but I do like using Pocket as a kind of reading queue to help keep my tabs tidy.
I use Evernote. It's the last "killer feature" of the platform. The software is too slow and clunky for taking notes (OneNote or Apple's stock Notes app are far better for this), even after the somewhat-recent update that improved performance, but it succeeds at saving webpages where other services fail. I tried to switch to OneNote's web clipper, but too often it could only save a link instead of clipping the page. Evernote also works on iOS.
There was an interesting comment on r/Evernote by a former employee who worked there about why the clipper works so well (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Evernote/comments/fbf8an/comment/fj...), based on acquisitions of other companies, custom code for certain websites, and a willingness to test websites where clipping doesn't work and (eventually) fix them.
However, there are issues with clipping on desktop Safari (occasionally there are bugs for periods of time, until fixes are implemented in an update), and sometimes clipping does break for certain websites (though this eventually gets fixed). I also find searching can take effort to find specific past web clips, though I'm not sure if the services is actually worse than before.
Web clipping is the last reason I'm staying with Evernote, writing as a user who has paid money in an attempt to migrate notes to another service (then finding that the other service was inadequate for web clipping).
Totally agree, application is weak. Don't understand the new listing and task management features. It just seems like a distraction.. why not have a proper table editor before you start adding new features. Also, the time to startup should be much shorter. I suggest they make a simple version of the tool, just list on the left (simplify the notebooks, and tags, etc). Get rid of the homepage. However, I just can't leave that clipper.
Even the simple fact that you can screenshot a part of the screen, annotate it, a toss it on the heap is so awesome. I don't worry about space, I don't worry about finding it. Search is really great on Evernote even picks up the text in images way..... before any tool was doing that.
Also, you can actually save the content of a page to a note (not just a link with an avatar). This is great for recipes that once you found it, you can never seem to find it ever again on google. Having a copy of that particular recipe with the right mix of ingredients I still have laying around. PERFECT!
I use Evernote as well. But for some stuff I'd rather be encrypted I find Joplin is a good open source Evernote alternative that lets you encrypt entire notebooks. Joplin's web clipper seems to work fine on Desktop though I've never tried it on mobile.
On my 4 year old Windows 10 ThinkPad laptop it now works very fast. I have 20k notes. At the beginning it was very clunky, now it works very well. At least this is my experience.
I used to have a large amount of bookmarks, carefully sorted into folders. I didn't use most of them on a regular basis, and the links broke over time. The end result was a bunch of broken bookmarks.
The combination of autocomplete, history, and web searches seems good enough to find anything I want.
Ya, the only bookmarks I use these days are the ones in Firefox's bookmark toolbar which are more there for quick access purposes than saving interesting articles
I suggest you don't. He's idlewords on this board and his comments speak for him (i.e. mocking his customers) -- he's effectively abandoned any work on Pinboard, including simple requests from paid users (of things as laid out instructions for the board), as well as ignoring error reports, etc.
This is how I discovered Safari on iOS has a hard limit of 500 open tabs. Rather horrifyingly, when you try to open tab number 501, it asks if you want to close all open tabs.
It's strange to me that browsers - both desktop and mobile - aren't more aggressive about "paging out" unused tabs. I end up just restarting Firefox now and then when I'm not ready to do a full cleanup.
Even with the fancy mobile interface you really just need to store a thumbnail (plus the URL and title) for each tab, and even an older iPhone should have little trouble scrolling through thousands of tiny images.
Firefox mobile does, it puts things behind an "inactive tabs" title on the tabs page.
In Chrome I use a tab suspender extension, in part because there was a bug that bit me alot where it would leak memory of you leave a tab active with a highlight. Don't know if the bug is fixed yet. Tab suspending makes my Surface Pro run better; seems like it shouldn't be needed.
I used to use pinboard[1] but since I started dicking around with self hosting I use Wallabag[2] for “read it later” articles and linkding [0] for saving links that I want to refer to later. Linkding is pretty much a self hosted pinboard
Linkding is my current favorite self-hosted solution in this genre. Used Pocket for a long time but like the tagging and minimal looks of linkding better.
When I find incredible in depth content that I plan to read later, my first step is always to drop it into archive.org, and then to bookmark the original link. That way if you're perusing later on and some links have died or been moved, you can always recover the content you want. Plus, it's archived for everyone else on the Internet which is a net benefit.
I donate to them yearly for being such a crucial piece of Internet infrastructure (in the historical, not literal, sense)
The suggested tags is what I'm really interested in, but don't want to pay extra for it. It'd be nice if a Chrome extension (since my bookmarks are sync'd there anyway) handled this with a nicer display but used the existing bookmarks.
For example, a tag of the subreddit would be excellent for all my recent /r/unixporn inspiration saves. Managing bookmarks is a hassle and why I usually don't bother or throw them into a "Misc" folder.
Locally encrypted, open source, free with no ads or can be self-hosted. And most importantly, its not tied to any particular browser. With xBrowserSync for bookmarks and Bitwarden for passwords, I can browser hop as much as I want.
I recall in the past lots of people reporting issues with their bookmarks going missing with xBrowserSync. It also hasn't been updated in quite some time. My biggest issue, is it appeared to primarily integrate with the browsers bookmark manager... and once you had thousands of bookmarks in the browser bookmark manager, it started lagging. I prefer something with a native local service to search and manage bookmarks, like Shiori.. but I don't like Shiori all that much either.
I've been using xBrowserSync for over 2 years to sync 4 devices without issue. I do occasionally export my bookmarks for backup, but haven't had to use it. I switched after losing years of bookmarks to a Firefox sync issue. One of the best things about xBrowserSync (for me) turned out to be its workflow. I can't imagine going back to bookmarking in nested folders. Using tags with search is just so much better.
I use it as well, the UI is a little cheesy and windows XPish (at least to my eyes). Maybe there is a technical limitation preventing it from inheriting the browser theme.
I’m using Safari on macOS and iOS as my primary browsers. If I find something worth bookmarking, I add it to Reading List (the keyboard shortcut is muscle memory by now) which gives me a searchable list of offline—readable sites synced across all my devices. I’ve also found the History search really great at quickly allowing me to solve the “what was that ZFS HOWTO was looking at last week?” type of situations.
I, too, am (was?) a long-time paying Pinboard user, but Reading List is just so much less friction. I found myself never going back to look through my Pinboard bookmarks.
Exactly, I think friction is critical in this case. Bookmarks and native reading lists definitely have an edge with that.
What you say about 'never going back' to bookmarked items is interesting, I've been feeling the same and despite trying many solutions I still have to find a tool that would help me classify, fill missing tags etc. to really organize my knowledge base better. I need something platform independent tho
so what is the reading list feature exactly, I was going to post to AskDifferent what's the deal with that feature and what does it offer precisely. I had stuff showing up in my list but they all got added there accidentally.
Does Safari download a static version of each page and caches it somewhere on disk and indexes it somewhere in the browser for you?
Offline reading doesn't always work. On the Mac I have to use the "save offline" menu. On iOS I haven't been able to find out when or why it does or doesn't work offline.
While it’s not on by default, there’s a Safari preference you can enable to save offline automatically: Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Save articles for offline reading automatically.”
Then I use the web export function there to export it to xml.
I wrote a script that would read that xml and pull (and if not available, fall back to archive.org) and cache (so only new bookmarks are downloaded) the sites, and built an offline version for archival and searching.
I switched from pinboard.in / del.icio.us (the social aspect was becoming less and less important) to a workflow based on braintool (https://braintool.org/) and org-mode TODO and tags, it completely changed the way I work with bookmarks now.
Hey this is great to hear @ews (BrainTool dev here). FWIW WRT this conversation, my long term hope for BrainTool is to generate a thriving ecosystem of shared curated topic trees, each one a little summary of a corner of the internet.
that's awesome, I wanted to publicly recognize your work, the tool is amazing, particularly for org-mode users (which is another incredible tool btw) - I appreciate your use of plain text as storage
It's also a good dumping ground for any kind of interesting snippet, image, or whatever I find interesting. There are some neat little features for occasionally sorting through your "mind" and discarding unused information.
It's not free, but I don't mind because the UI happens to work well for me. It's thoughtful, well-crafted, and I'm happy to support them.
I can’t give an opinion on the iOS experience. It really could be bad. What I love is the web experience, and it’s where I tend to use a screen so it works well for me.
I have been looking into this lately as well. My problem is that even if I visit back those pages, I don't remember the context of why I bookmarked it.
I have been toying with a chrome extension that enables me to add "annotations" to these pages and it helps me find websites based on my note search. It's far from perfect but I realized that I remember my notes / thoughts more than the website url or name.
Linkding uses SQLite as the database, which for self-hosting is such a huge win. It doesn't do much in the way of local archiving, but the interface looks so incredibly clean.
I haven't tried this yet, but since I have "HTTP Shortcuts" (wonderful Android app) already installed I really appreciated the ability to be able to send bookmarks from my phone easily without installing anything new:
I recently launched an iOS app that may be relevant here!
Unlike other apps that save bookmarks that stay unread forever, Ephemera sets a deadline that the bookmark must be read by. Miss the deadline, and that bookmark is gone.
Awesome, I've been looking for something like this forever! I use Pocket a ton and make lots of highlights. But its search and archive features have been practically unusable for 3 years for me despite frequent complaints to support.
Bummer, though, since it looks like Pocket's API doesn't export the highlights or any metadata about them. Unless it's hidden in the "fts" or whatever that is.
Also using Raindrop.io - it works great with Make integrations and the dev responds to issues. Good to sync between multiple browsers on multiple devices.
Came here to say the same. I'm also a very satisfied raindrop.io user. Native Safari integration for both macOS and iOS is a huge plus, and the friction is low to put bookmarks into categories and apply tags when saving them.
I use a text file in Git with one URL per line with commentary following the URL, with hashtags in the line. This makes text search through the comments really easy (especially including isearch in Emacs) but doesn't provide archival, thumbnailing, or full-text search of page contents. I don't have the collaboratively suggested tags from del.icio.us but what I miss more is the feed of other people's linkblogs.
Each day has a blank line and a "links for 02022-06-23:" header beginning it.
FWIW this is how I saved URLs originally; when it got unmaneagable I built muxway and then del.icio.us. The notes became tags as they were often a single word. Hash because it was a comment.
Interesting, did factoryjoe know that when he proposed hashtags for Twitter? There weren't hash marks in the del.icio.us interface but I don't remember if muxway had them or not.
I still have an XML dump of my del.icio.us bookmarks that I haven't merged in. The linkrot rate is pretty high.
Awesome alternative. I've been using Shaarli for a very long time. Very stable, always works, everywhere works. Doesn't look fancy, but reliability is off the charts.
I've had too many bookmarks go offline a few years after the fact, so now I just print anything interesting to PDF (I use safari's "Share" button and send it to DEVONthink, two clicks and I have a permenant archive sorted into categories.)
I use and love Pinboard, plus the Instapaper-like read-it-later integration Paperback (readpaperback.com) set as my home page in my mobile browser. It’s a great combo.
What I mean by that is if I see a page I want to read later, I need to have it in NetNewsWire to read it; otherwise I never read them. So I subscribe to my Pocket account’s RSS feed, so whenever I bookmark something in Pocket, it’s ready to be started in NetNewsWire whenever I get to reading my feeds.
I’m big on having one destination for all the things I follow. I follow YouTube accounts through RSS as well.
I use Pocket, and Alfread on top of that. Will switch out pocket for instapaper though, because Pocket cannot seem to download articles in the background, so when I'm reading on unreliable connections the articles are never there.
I'd rather not use a 3rd party service. All I really need is the bookmarking UX already built into the browser but behind the scenes it captures the contents of the link (locally) and stores it against the bookmark. Bonus points if it asks where I want the bookmarks and their snapshots to be stored/synced to.
I've been working on a solution to this: https://diva.so mainly cause I had the same issue.
It's a third-party service unfortunately, but it can index the contents of your bookmarks + other sources to let you search them. I haven't got it to work locally yet since the search needs a decently large server to work (I want to use a LLM eventually) but I do encrypt all data. I don't know how it compares to similar systems linked here, but I'm down to try to help you out to set it up in a way to your liking.
I generally archive as pdf ONLY things really interesting me, in org-mode/org-roam managed notes as org-attachments, most other links are just noted with a not-that-good but the best I found combo:
The first to quickly copy text from html, the second to see if something is already noted, the third to quickly archive the bookmark. In the past I've used Zotero witch works automatically VERY well (and on deduplicated storage does not consume so much disk space) but since it's a kind of walled-garden in the sense I can't really integrate it in anything else I decide to have a bit less features but hyper-superior integration with org-mode.
I’ve tried just about every app in the space (some great tools listed in this thread) and haven’t found one that works for me, so I’m building one!
My workflow is save for later focused (I tend to save content to read / learn from vs bookmark resources to visit) and now days I’m collecting content in so many different forms (podcasts, video, newsletters, etc). I’ve found that nobody has native support for every content form I save and it’s been a big pain point. We're focusing on nailing native support for all content types / sources and building tools to help you manage the forever growing list of content that can sometimes happen when your library grows!
It’s called Upnext (https://www.getupnext.com), happy to share invites with HNers in search of a tool in this space, email in profile!
I personally ended up building my own solution with the following requirements
* easy to export or convert later e.g. json
* simple to build/maintain e.g. github action + hugo
* easy to access from the phone e.g. telegram
The internet is far too "entropic" to trust bookmarks alone. This has been a clear failing of the web since the 1990s.
I've literally been downloading pages since then to have a local image. I've written various native code tools to extract text, index that and then markup the files with keywords and then create a local search engine back.
SO MUCH is shadow-edited, deleted or lost. It's foolish to rely on ANYTHING online for more than a year or even less. If it matters you must have a full archive.
When PDFs are referenced (e.g. scientific papers - I have 1000s of COVID papers), I download those and index them.
This is also why I never rely on e-books - I order a hard copy because in 20-100 years, it will ONLY be the paper version that will still be around.
I found bookmarking tools often lacking a more holistic integration into research workflows that are not just about saving things, but also taking notes.
We’ve developed Memex to solve for that. It’s an offline first extension for bookmarking and annotating websites, pdfs and youtube videos. Also you can collaboratively curate and discuss them, and it has a mobile app to save and annotate websites.
It’s availabe for Chrome/Brave and Firefox (memex.garden)
I use Slack as my bookmark manager ;) Have my own personal Slack workspace where I have various channels for certain types of bookmarks(coding/emacs/history,etc). On my Debian box at home I have weechat with the weeslack plugin where my weechat instance runs in a tmux session 24X7 and I log everything locally to disk. That way I can just open up the Slack log for a given channel to find a specific bookmark in Emacs via search/regex search. Have Slack clients at work, mobile, and home, so it seems to work pretty good for me.
Kinda/sorta. I use https://dynalist.io as my outliner. And it has browser clipper plugins that in their simplest use snapshot the title/url of the page you're on. So I often clip urls into there.
But it as a tool is much broader. I use it as my GTD inbox, and for task management, and other notes. The fact that I can simply search for pages that I've clipped (including adding #tags to them, or grouping them) is a lovely subset of what I use it for.
I realized that I never go back to my bookmarks and if I really wanted to find something again I usually am able to. I came to the same realization with hoarding movies / tv shows.
As a counterpoint, I don't go to my bookmarks often, but when I do, it's invaluable, and I'd feel lost without them.
Especially with tags, I can quickly find a number of things I find/found interesting just by using one or two tags.
I agree about hoarding media, though. But I still like to have metadata on content I want to watch, and content I've watched and what I thought about it.
I've also come to this realization. It was one of the more freeing realizations I've had, along with "I don't have to save every email I've ever received for all time".
The weight off my mind from skipping the maintenance, care, and feeding of various digital libraries is considerable, and I recommend it to stressed out friends & family.
This is the state I am rapidly approaching. Outside of Toolbar quick access stuff I find I always search or it pops up in history suggestions before I search
I developed a product, Critical Context. Shared bookmarking and search for software teams.
You share a document with your team. E.g. "best cloud vendors".
Then for that document, each team member installs a bookmarklet, and collectively contributes to the research by submitting bookmarks, search queries, and screen shots.
Helpful if your team is collectively researching vendors, frameworks, etc.
I made my own [0][1] that saves archives of the pages bookmarked, stores the browsing history, open tabs, and more. I've open sourced it but the open source code on GitHub is a bit out of date.
I use pinboard.in, 99,9% via either the iOS & macOS app „Pins“. This is mainly something that buys me peace of mind, in case the browser history fails me.
I built a little chrome extension[0] that allows you to like and share links as you are browsing the web. It was originally intended to be kind of like Digg, but most people just use it to bookmark.
I used to use instapaper quite a bit, but when I figured out that I almost never went back and read any of my saved links, I stopped.
If I'm not interested enough to read the link now, I almost certainly am not going to read it later.
Sort of the same reason I don't take photos anymore. I never go back and look at them, so it's just a waste of time and a distraction from being really present in the moment.
Not here to spam, but we're building a really interesting product called mutter where in it's next iteration, every user can store, curate and post links into streams, which we think of as a combination of User x Topic. For example, if a user wants to curate content on React, then the user can create a stream specific to it. This stream isn't a global topic like a subreddit but something specific to a user.
The user can then curate content via both in-app "post" feature, as well as a chrome extension. Interestingly, the discovery feed will also be built in a way that it allows you re-discover content, because we end up saving a lot of content, but rarely end up revisiting them.
:) The current prototype of mutter (URL: https://mutter.ai) was built as a research exercise. We're working on totally new prototype but with a different set of designs.
Similarly to other commenters here, I would like to share my approach:
- if it's an article related to my interests and that fits for the overall contents I share on twitter - I simply tweet about it.
- if it's code-related (e.g. github repo) - I just "star" it
- if it's something else - it depends what category it is, because I have two bookmark folders in the browser: "4 later" (so that if something seems to be interesting but I don't have time right now to read it) or "saved" folder where I just put something that I would like to have bookmarked (I've also have then nested year sub-folders (as I don't bookmark THAT often that this approach wouldn't be sufficient for me)).
- if something is very important for me, I simply send an e-mail to myself with tagged content so I can easily find it through e-mail search engine later - I have a dedicated e-mail suffix for this (imagine xyz+bookmark@gmail.com) and it automatically goes archived into "bookmarks" folder instead to inbox.
For me, it all started with Delicious (del.icio.us) but then it got bought by Yahoo!, which added unnecessary functionality and eventually the system died, got traded, sold, wherever. Either way, it became useless.
I transferred all of my links to Diigo, which had much the same functionality, but a LOT of extras. Diigo really focuses on the extras and I felt the weren't really interested in the features I considered for
Core.
I eventually realized that the guy who originally started del.icio.us was running a service called Pinboard. I checked it out, read his blog, saw how dedicated he was to providing a good service and being attentive to his customers and signed up. https://pinboard.in/ is a fantastic bookmarking service which ticks all the right boxes and doesn't try to be something it shouldn't. If you're tactical in your tagging you should be able to find your valuable links easily.
No, I used to be super into bookmarks and a lot of the first code I wrote was to help me manage them and to discover new things from others via delicious bookmarks and things like that.
In recent years I've found that I only visit 5 out so websites with any regularity and everything else is as quick to Google for as to search my bookmarks for.
For posts, it's in the list of button links under the post title at the top of the discussion page. For comments, you have to click the timestamp first.
Note that favourites are public and anyone can see what you added to your list. If you don't upvote spuriously, upvotes can also function as a private favourites list.
I totally didn't know/forgot that I can get a list of everything I upvoted from HN, but yeah, there it is on my profile! That could have saved me a lot of time in the past trying to figure out "what was that thing again I saw on HN last week?"
Raindrop.io at scale did not work well for me it was a lot more upkeep and the load times were a bit much. Also, the main pain point for me was the browser extension would constantly crash and not populate my tags or folders.
I still use Instapaper, though their mobile apps are not terribly useful, and very slow. Mostly I just use it to bookmark things--I read so voraciously that searching through 25 new bookmarks a day is way easier than searching through 250+ history entries a day, not to mention Chrome isn't indexing every page I've visited.
I use an org mode capture template and a couple browser extensions. Dead simple for bookmarks and surfacing the context inside Emacs. - I have two use cases: 1. a simple bookmark I want to revisit (maybe) and 2. A bookmark with an excerpt from the page. I can copy in the material I want to capture all withe the same process.
I use the bookmark feature built into my web browser, which also syncs with my smartphone. For bookmarks I want to share publicly, I just drop them onto a hand-coded HTML page on my website: https://kerricklong.com/bookmarks/
For private use: I rarely bookmark anything anymore. Lots of info is easy to find (e.g. Arch Linux Wiki) and reasonable reliable. Also my password manager has a list of all accounts with associated URLs, so I can search that.
For work I have a wider variety of information. I'm often doing Pentests, so I read up on related research a lot. Since I can't keep every minor detail in my head, I bookmark interesting things in the browser; that's then backed up, but that's about it.
As a typical tech hobby, I run a few home servers and recently got myself an "always on" machine. Now I'm looking at self hosted services my family and/or I could genuinely benefit from. Bookmark sync between my work laptops could be nice, but Yacy mentioned in the top comment is insanely attractive - indexing (+archiving?) beats bookmarking.
Yes. I built my own https://www.kontxt.io and hit the front page of HN not too long ago. It's a modern hybrid productivity and social bookmarking / news / knowledge aggregation service. Think social web layer with CMS and social network.
You can save the site / pdf (link or archive), engage with highlights, comments, and polls. There's privacy controls. It's searchable. Everything can be organized with tags as well as folders. You can join groups and follow people to discover shared content. Highlights can be shared natively to popular social platforms and observed with analytics. User's can also set a personal promotion with what they share as an added benefit and incentive to provide value.
As a service it doesn't appear to be being actively developed, but it is reliable, isn't too fugly and has the required functionallity (multiplatform/browser/mobile support, good search, read later, tags, highlighting, sticky notes, private and public libraries and archiving for important stuff) in a reasonably easy to use form.
diigo's not perfect by any means - automated tagging suggestions could benefit from ML pixie dust - but certainly the best first stage of research and web page archiving solution I've found (compared to DevonThink, Pocket, Evernote, InstaPaper, A's Notes (and a few others I've forgotten))
Im using onetab. I setup a shortcut (ctrl+shift+z) and close all my tabs which I may want back at some point with that shortcut. This healed me from wanting to hold onto my tabs. I kill them off with onetab and rarely do I revisit. Just knowing it's there helps a ton.
I get the feeling most ppl keep tons and tons of tabs open these days. Browsers keep having to reduce the workload of background tabs, and have even added some UX features like tab grouping and pinning. And then there's the success of tab manager browser extensions...
https://guardo.io/ does exactly this, it saves the entire page in case it gets deleted. It comes with a nice search engine where you can search for any words included in the page you save.
I use Wallabag on a yunohost server. I highly recommend it. Easy saving, offline reading, and sharing between devices. I wish it were easier to share with others, but I read some PR comments yesterday clarifying why support has bigger implications for the tool.
Hard to beat Zotero as a bookmarking service IMO. Saves a copy of the article and makes it available through the web interface if you're not at your usual desktop. $20 a year for 2 GB of storage is a good value if you want to go beyond the free plan.
I do use bookmarks, but usually it's about crudely saving a session for easy access, to continue from where I left off the next day more than anything.
If I want to save a page for future reference because it's useful more generally, I actually have a special "References" deck in Anki for that, which has various useful levels of categorization applied.
Similarly, if it's an article I want to queue for serious future reading, I have a "Reading" deck. After reading (and potentially after having been converted to anki notes in the Main deck) notes from the reading deck go either in the Archived deck after reading, or in the References deck accordingly.
I mostly use bookmarks for easy access to commonly used tools and documentation; however, typically, I suffer from the fact when I need to share a set of bookmarks, the browser support of export/import is really awful for both the exporter and importer.
I encountered it so much that I built a tool in the last few months to allow sharing of bookmarks natively in the browser. I didn't want to use a new tool to manage my bookmarks; I just wanted to enhance the browser bookmark feature with the ability to share bookmarks.
- captures a tree tab structure (inspired by Tree Style Tab)
- has a text-heavy interface
- is keyboard driven (inspired by Vim)
- keeps data local or syncs to a GitHub gist (no server)
- exports to Markdown
I often hear from others they need something similar, and I thought about finishing it up so others can use it. But my fear is that I made too many personal design choices that nobody else would like, and changing those choices would make myself less happy (but surely make it easier for others to use).
I used Pocket for a few years but the company never fixed any bugs that severely restricted its utility. Since then I’ve switched to Raindrop.io and have never looked back. I use it on web and mobile, and it’s excellent.
For some types of bookmarks I started to use a GitHub repositories with a markdown document in them. Those are my bookmarks collected mainly through HN:
I don't use a bookmarking service, but I use built-in bookmarking, then every 2 days I export it to a specific directory on my machine in case of having to move to another browser or for rewinding time.
Not much different from just having a text file. Easy to backup, can grep keywords etc. Lack of sync is a disadvantage so I sometimes use "note to self" on signal when I want to save something from mobile.
With FF it's Tab Stash for me[0].
Then I export to Chrome when I have a period of using it as my main browser.
For portability, I use a public Telegram channel that I post interesting links to for later reading. Given the web version doesn't require to be logged in and has a search bar it's very good for accessing everything you have.
I use http://dynalist.io you can clip anything into your inbox, either the url (default when nothing is selected), or selected text on the page (with url of where it came from), and it works on all platforms. Once you have your data in a list you can do whatever you want with it and curate it the way you want, search it, and tag it.
Also, you can export the data out pretty easily also, which may not be the case with other bookmarking services.
I made this shell script to save them in a text file with title and tags and I can search with fzf. The nice thing is that I can open urls in specific software. A video in mpv, a gemini url in amfora and so on. It's not really well written but it serves my needs. But I still need a way to import my browser bookmarks.
https://github.com/paulobtn/cli-bookmarker
I use the free pocket service with a browser extension to “save to pocket” which bookmarks with optional tags I can provide when I save. Also gives reader view on their site when I browse my saved list. Favorites archive feature article view highlights video aggregator. Can create collections too. It lets me save quickly which fits my workflow. Could I do the same with bookmarks? Not quite, I’m Mac at home pc and Mac at work so the saas feature fixes cross browser saving issue.
I’m only saving articles for later (and then videos directly on YouTube).
The problem with bookmarks is going back to them (if ever), so I always tend to forget about what I’ve saved and then just google what I need in the moment.
With articles it’s a bit different but I used to save a lot of articles to Pocket and then Instapaper, and reading them not too often.
Now using Alfread that sends me quotes from saved articles as reminders, so that helps a bit.
I use org-capture. The setup is a bookmark in firefox that triggers emacs, where I save all the pages I visit and that interest me. The links are saved in a plain text file, which I later edit and export to any format I wish. A good explanation here [1]
I'm still using a clone of https://del.icio.us/ that I wrote in 2004 after a fit of pique when it went down for a day or two. I use it almost daily and have amassed 11,490 links as of today, and most of them have the HTML cached.
It's kind of fun to track my interests over time by counting tag frequency, but I mainly use it out of nostalgia and for the mere constancy of it.
How do you get it to work with sites that are javascript-heavy or have heavy bot restrictions? I've been trying to make something similar but spent weeks just fighting edge cases on HTML not caching correctly.
I don't worry about it and just use a straight-up HTTP GET. That works a surprising number of times. If I was trying harder I would use Puppeteer or similar and try to grab a full height screenshot. Most of the time I'm just clicking the URL to get back to the page.
My bookmarks have not changed in a long time. I use the same bookmarks. I never really use the service, because I never really use bookmarks all that much, I’ll just Google something. I found the bookmarks get on wielding and I start losing track of them and I start having lists of bookmarks that are 9 years old.
Rather than bookmarks I use Pocket. It’s been very helpful especially for articles and technical websites that I want to be able to reference later.
I tried Pocket, but it wouldn't let me edit titles, which was a bit of a deal-killer. So then I tried Raindrop (free plan), and I have been using that ever since.
I use "collections" to describe abstract properties of a bookmark, like "work" for work-related, "reference" for 'I have read it but I might want to refer to it later'. Then I use tags for identifying topic - but a lot of the time there's enough info in the title, and tags don't really add much for the effort involved.
I add stuff in FF Group Speed Dial [0] under a variety of headings. I try to stick to ~100-150 links in there, deleting entire headings once past their usefulness.
They're no good as a long term knowledge base however -- search is too limited.
I started just saving web pages I like. Bookmarks are great but they are so prone to link rot I find, so its better to save a local copy you can keep forever.
I recently started actively bookmarking pages again recently (after being an early Pinboard customer, but not a particularly busy one). I wrote a script to email me 5 random bookmarks every day, so now I treat bookmarking as a "like" button; something I find interesting at the time, and may want to rediscover in the future. I rarely use bookmarks to find something I'm searching for though.
If I think I may need to refer to that content again, I'll also 'printfriendly' (convert the relevant content I need to PDF). I do this for 3 reasons, 1) In case I may need to refer to it again, and the website/content is gone. 2) I'm a digital hoarder. 3) I also like to have stuff available locally in case of extended internet outage
I used some of the solutions listed here (like Pocket) for a time. Eventually, I decided I can just post them in my website [1], because why not : that way they are accessible from everywhere, easy to edit, categorize and comment, shareable with anyone in seconds.
I had a Mozilla wave back in the days. And I was very happy. Today you need 3 containers, is it awfully complex and there is no documentation. And the Mozilla guys are far less helpful than in the irc days. Could be cool. But unfortunately sucks. Is there anyone with a Mozilla sync setup, that is reasonably secure and willing to share his configuration?
Most of the things I find interesting are on HN or reddit, though I probably make about 20 bookmarks a year in my browser. I have Vivaldi sync set up.
I have an interest in building a "saved item" extraction tool for my reddit accounts that exports them to a bookmark file for offline storage. Same with Hacker News. Though if the tool already exists, please link it here!
I'm running a bookmarking site with a specific set of features at kntm.org and am using it since 2014, please join!
I also use OneTab (or similar) to clear up open tabs. I use Pocket just for sending articles to my kobo reader and Instapaper for read-it-later. Also using Materialistic app to quickly save HN articles.
I think the basic functionality of bookmarking will never be obsolete.
I haven't thought about it in years... but is Delicious still a thing? I would think (hope?) there would be an open source, PHP-based project I could throw onto commodity hosting to collect and manage bookmarks. If this doesn't exist it should -- and I wonder how hard it would be to also integrate saving/sharing tab-sets as well.
There's a whole community of "shaarlist" in France, you can also fuse several shaarli in a "river"... Some rivers are my 2nd HckrNws when I want to read something.
I have literally thousands of bookmarks in Firefox that I use for their keyword aliases and manage by regex. But I don't think that's what you meant.
I also have several hundred "normal" bookmarks across several folders. Documentation, Hobby, "randomly cool," etc. But I definitely lose a lot of content that I wish I didn't.
I've also recently cobbled together a CLI tool that lets me save discussion threads on Reddit, HN and Stack Exchange. Very much a beginner-level project but here it is in case anyone is interested:
I use Pinboard, like many others here. The other thing I do is use that API to write new entries from time to time, to my own local DB, in case the author gets hit by a bus (as he's joked about). I haven't written a front end to do much _with_ my local copy, but figure that's a problem I can deal with when I need to.
I miss furl a lot. It was a short lived service in the days of Web 2.0 where it not only bookmarked the pages for you but also saved a scraped copy and indexed it so it was really easy to find content later. It was an amazing academic research tool that I think would be incredibly valuable for the problem it was trying to solve.
A few years ago, I started using a wiki as a sort of all encompassing knowledgebase. In time, my wiki took over even using browser bookmarks. When I found a link that I wanted to remember, I would include a link to it in the context of the entry. The upshot is that I always had context for what I wanted or thought about the link.
No. I use Safari and no one makes any extensions for this browser anymore and I don’t blame them — Apple has put in significant amount of effort in discouraging such service providers. Installing third party apps is tedious and often breaks.
Last bookmarking service I used was pinboard. I still have an account on there but that’s about it.
I use DEVONthink to keep a local copy (WebArchive) of interesting pages. On top of obvious bookmarking features like tags I get good search, annotations, and preservation to name a few things. Preservation is underrated. I have quite a few pages that are no longer available on the web (even in various archives).
DevonThink is one of those rare old-school apps which support open-standard protocols, e.g. self-hosted (FreeNAS/TrueNAS) WebDAV for sync of archives between iOS and macOS.
> Preservation is underrated. I have quite a few pages that are no longer available on the web (even in various archives).
Lire is an RSS reader that can archive the full text of all articles, even if the RSS feed is limited. Allows offline reading and mitigates the risk of blogs disappearing. http://lireapp.com/
I used to use Keep. But have switched to pinboard for the last 8 months and incredibly happy about it. Just don't want to wake up one morning and see Google is shutting it down and go through all the hassle that comes with it.
"I don't want to use it because Google is going to shut it down" is HN's version of Twitter/Reddit's "Sir, this is a Wendy's". Here's some more pablum: "We can do better."
Gives a simple explorer style folder/bookmark structure. Can be reordered any way you want. Can sync to browsers if you want but I prefer to just use the website.
If it's something I want to read and then be done with it, I keep the tab open.
If it's something I may want to come back to, or something that I'd be sad if it disappeared from the web, I save it to a synced folder using the SingleFile extension which inlines all content into a single HTML file.
Frankly I just want a progressive bookmark system. I want to be able to hit Ctrl+D on John Doe's blog site and have the bookmark keep track of where I was on the site. If I read the first three posts and then close the tab I want to pick up where I left off when I open the bookmark.
Why? My Safari bookmarks are automatically synced between all of my devices. When I was using Windows, I could use the official Apple plug in for Firefox and Chrome to sync between Safari/Chrome/Firefox and they would each stay synced (eventually) between all of my browsers.
I use Nextcloud's bookmark features via the YunoHost instance I self host. A simple roll your own solution of sorts. https://yunohost.org/ is a really cool project. I love what they're doing.
For temporary or read-later items, I have a Todoist project called "Links to Read" and I use the Todoist browser extension to send the page to that project.
For more permanent links, I maintain quite an extensive collection of bookmarks, all neatly organized by subject area and utility.
I have a similar setup (I use raindrop.io) for temp links. I am meaning to find better organization ways for my permanent links. Curious to know details about your setup
I haven't bookmarked anything in over 20 years. I just use my memory + search. Obviously bookmarking can retain far more than my memory, but my use of the web is deep, not wide (i.e. small number of sites, used heavily) so is easily handled by local site search engines.
The bookmarks i require are usually research related, therefore clustered. Just add the link into Trilium (or other note taking software), and add a few bullet points of description.
If i need it again, i either know where it is (part of which research), or can find it with the note search.
Sites and pages that i use get bookmarked in Firefox and synced to my devices.
Notable things that ai might need in the future go into Notion with (critically) some notes on context and why theyre important. If i xant be bothered to write any notes then its not important enough to be added.
I’m still working on https://Mitta.is, which saves sites, PDFs and images. It has some auto tagging enabled right now, with some additional GPT3 features coming soon for discussions about content saved.
I use Firefox bookmarks which syncs across all devices and has tags (although it's difficult to get them out without using the places.sqlite database file). I also have a subscription to pinboard.in but only to sync my FF bookmarks and tags there as a backup.
I typically write the URL in my notes if I need to look at it again for some specific reason.
For more silly things, I created a private subreddit together with my brother. We post things that we find interesting enough to share and re-visit in there, which is quite a nice format.
I store them in markdown files. It allows me to have a description and have multiple links for that description. I have separate markdown files for different categories.
For some pages I will manually use an archive service and include the archived links with the original link.
Yes, I wrote my own service after Maciej (very politely, this is not a criticism!) asked grandfathered-in single-payment Pinboard users if they would consider a recurring payment. It's a simple Python / Flask app which runs on a host running Dokku.
I use the same app for archiving everything - bookmarks, whole website crawls, 15+ years of email history, receipts, large files and media, directories on my computer - everything. DevonThink - native mac app with fast search that has never failed me.
I still maintain a linkblog, via Pinboard. You can read it via RSS from Pinboard or the best view these days is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/somebitsLinks
I use Dynalist and a custom chrome extension which uses its API to save links to a list. On Android I use an app which can send http requests to any address. I use that to share urls from browser etc to that app which again send that link to Dynalist.
I've been using Pocket since it was ReadItLater. Two areas need improvement: 1) display of recipes in article mode and 2) display and redirection of Reddit articles. I'm intrigued with the yacy setup of user l72. I may check that out...
I use the browser, mainly just to get autocomplete in the address bar.
But, browser bookmark management ranges from barely acceptable to irritating. Never great, or innovative, like some of these services. I wish the browser vendors would adopt some of this stuff.
I just create a note in my personal wiki/notes and leave it there with enough metadata that I can later find it. If it makes sense, I also take a snapshot via archive.is or ghostarchive.org if it makes sense (the website is not a web-app).
Upvoting posts on Hacker News is my substitute for bookmarking things these days, as it's almost the only route by which I find stuff I wish to find again these days.
I'm just (still) waiting on someone to develop the app which lets me search it.
All my bookmarks goes to a mess. So I found the best for me, at first save everything with Singlefile (extensions for browsers), then add everything to zip file.
To search I use grep, find, etc.
And this is perfect!
I’ve been really happy with “Save as PDF” into my Dropbox folder. If you use Safari’s reader mode before you save it’s especially nice and the files are small. Works great with spotlight search and accessible on mobile.
I don't suppose Raindrop has a read-aloud feature? This is one of my most heavily used features in Pocket. Looking at Raindrop's features I might be inclined to move if it does support this.
Pockey + Pocket 2 Kindle for things I want to read later. Otherwise, HN favorites and digging through Firefox history / other devices to find that one page whatwasitcalled IknowIreadthatyesterday.
After I reached around 7-8k bookmarks the only thing that worked for me is an orgmode text file in a git repo, but it's true that I don't need fancy syncing or sharing/social features.
Raindrop. Every day, for all things. The snapshots of the pages it takes means that if I see something I can later say something, it doesn't matter who grooms the content meanwhile.
I think most people's "bookmarking service" these days, including myself, is to just have an extra browser window that has a million "read later" tabs.
> If not, do you collect web pages some other way?
I send it to myself in the @karaterobot (or equivalent) channel in Mattermost, which is the self-hosted chat program I use. This is exactly equivalent to sending it to yourself in Slack, except that free versions of Slack have a limited history, after which your archive will be lost (or, rather, held behind a paywall). The advantage of this method is that it's organized by time, and searchable, and you can save links, documents, images, notes, etc.
I will self promote as it’s one of the main use cases of Boomerang. It’s a minimal mail to self app for iOS and Android with share extension to bookmark website in one click. Emails are super convenient because you consult them everyday so your links doesn’t get lost in an app.
This is cool. I started using your app after reading about it here a few days ago. I guess you want to keep it as simple as possible, but have you considered adding the option to edit the email before it gets sent?
when I am researching on something, I usually just dump links with a line describing them on obsidian.md so I can go back to it when I need to. Bookmarks never worked for me.
For a couple years I've been working on a personal Flask App that will collect and organize my SingleFile [1] downloads. Uses inotify to automatically detect a SingleFile generated html file and processes it into a database, where it also creates a screenshot thumbnail.
Been working great for me so far, and definitely help me improve my coding skills. One of the things I like the most is that it records the time I downloaded the SingleFile page, which means I can view a timeline of bookmarks. It is nice to visually review over the month what I decided to save, often as a way to reinforce what I learned.
ofc, speeddial 2, except.. they updated it a few months ago. and it's broken now. fml. no updates for years, worked perfectly. until now.. so i dont recommend it.
I use Firefox sync. Make sure to open the settings page and to disable everything else, the default behavior is to capture credit cards, logins, passwords, and complete history (I would qualify this default behavior as 100% in violation with the privacy by default principle required by GDPR in EU but hey, who am I to voice an opinion :)
Bookmarks never worked for me. If I find something interesting I add it to an existing Google Doc, or create an new Google Doc for it. Google Docs are easy to search.
Yacy is actually a distributed search engine, but I run in 'Robinson mode' as a private peer, to keep it isolated, as I just want a personal search of only sites I have indexed.
Anytime I come across something of interest, I index it with yacy, using a a depth of 0 (since I only want to index that one page, not the whole site). This way, I can just go to my search site, and search for something, and anything related that I've indexed before pops up. I found this works way better than trying to manage bookmarks with descriptions and tags.
Also, yacy will keep a cache of the content which is great if the site ever goes offline or changes.
If I need to browse, I can go use yacy's admin tools to see all the urls I have indexed.
I have been using this for several months and I am using this way more than I ever used my bookmarks.
[1] https://yacy.net/