I had the same problem until I realized that bookmarks are more or less pointless, especially without context or additional information.
Most of the time I used bookmarks to either "read it later" or to "look it up again". In both cases I often desperately tried to find a specific bookmark in a collection of unsorted crap. After organizing them into topics / folders / subfolders, it worked a bit better, but I still had the same problem: How to find the one piece of information I'm looking for in a whole bunch of unsorted content? And what if that has changed or become unavailable somehow (except via archive.org).
These days I use a knowledge collection (flatnotes, but Notion, Obsidian or Logseq would work just fine). If a bookmark is only short content (let's say an interesting git solution or a quick fix for something), I immedeately "extract" this piece of information into my knowledge base in a well organized markdown with headlines including a reference to the URL. If it is a "read later" thing, I invest at least 2 Minutes to write a short summary (2 sentences), what the article is about and what I expect it to help my with.
This has proven to work MUCH better to organize "bookmarks" and informational content. Bookmarks are just for backup now.
It was a real problem. I used to keep hundreds of bookmarks I felt forced to check out, tag and archive. It was mentally draining and time consuming. I was never satisfied with the way I sorted them and I would often move them around, trying new categories and labeling strategies. Overall, I likely spent more time managing bookmarks than reading their content. It wasn't sustainable and I ended up deleting most of them.
Now I keep it to the bare minimum:
1) Favorites bar: up to 10 websites I visit on daily basis.
2) Inspiration folder: where I put things I like. 330 as of today. Website layouts, painters, dev blogs, Youtube videos, anything that has good vibes. That's the only criteria. I make it an effort not to add any subfolder. The only exception is "Favorite projects" which is my little Hall of Fame for quality content. https://ciechanow.ski/ is up there.
3) Trashcan folder: where I place temporary bookmarks I don't care about and will delete in the next few days.
I periodically export my bookmarks so I don't feel guilty when I delete entries from the browser. You could do the same. Put the exported files in a usb stick and forget about them.
I'm using Telegram's "Saved Messages" channel to bookmark things, and I'm pinning what's really important. The advantage is that I can access it anywhere and anytime (with the Android app), all while sharing all types of content, including files. I have a Python script running every 24 hours that uses the Telegram API and a SQLite database storing all my pinned messages in that channel. Each time the script is ran, it sends me two types of emails: 1) a "new" type of email that gathers all the messages that I've pinned recently, and 2) a "reminder" type of email that randomly shows X pinned messages. This forces me to reduce my backlog and unpin what is no longer relevant or things that I can deal with in a few minutes.
I think most people will improve their lives by never thinking about things like bookmarks and saved links.
One of the better ideas I’ve heard is just put a little bookmarklet in your browser that does nothing other than displays a message like “saved” or “added to read later.”
Gives you the dopamine hit of pretending like you’re going to read it later without the hassle or disappointment of never actually doing it.
With search degrading, it's quite nice to save things that you found interesting, but did not have the bandwidth for. Like I can stumble on a curated list of books, a repository of information about some niche, blog of someone that shares my interest... I prefer to add it to the pile instead of dealing with SEO trying to find it again. And as for read-it later, I prefer to hoard interesting things in case I'm actually forced to do it (They're saved offline on my tablet).
I was previously using Anybox (macOS, iOS) and it worked great for me, especially with focusing on a small amounts of tags acting as collections. I've moved to a single org file with tags and links as second level headings. I'm thinking on moving these to a wiki style with pages as collections of links like (emacs, linux, writing,...).
As @sandreas said, try to extract context from these links. Like if there's some workflow or high level explanations in the page, a quick summary would help greatly when attached to where you noted the link.
For me links serve three primary purposes. Quick access, interesting resources, and snippets of informations. For the first kind, they might as well be in my browser. The wiki style repository is for the second one. And for the third, I'd rather add them to my notes, citation style. Meaning, I extract the relevant information as a note and add the link as the source.
I just... don't. During the early years of the web, I repeatedly lost all my bookmarks - when moving from one browser or machine or OS to the next - until I realized that they didn't matter enough to be worth the effort of retaining them.
I am finding that most saved bookmarks are simply not that important, until one of them is.
I don't use bookmarks in any of the browsers because I use different browsers and devices and they don't all sync and I actually don't want them to sync or sign in which can become a time sink.
If it's that important *today*, I manually save "One-liners & Links of the Day" chronologically month to month in a hand-coded HTML file which is my home page which can easily be accessed from all devices and browsers. If I go back in the chronology and frequently access a link, I might put it at the top of the home page under "Favourites / Recents / Frequents."
To answer your question, yes: I have problems with bookmark organization.
It's a simple flat list of links that you annotate with a description for better search. The killer feature is that it works with Firefox's keyword search. I can enter `go gith prof` in the url bar and hit enter. Since there is only one entry that matches (with description 'github profile'), I'm immediately redirect to that link.
I just keep a copy of every webpage I view, on local storage. ( SingleFile extension )
Also Use History Trends Unlimited extension with regular backups.
Webpages that I think are particularly interesting I also keep a indexable PDF copy. Its all searchable. Uses about 1TB month storage. I've given up on bookmarking tools , too many problems with them.
You don't even have to manually bookmark, in fact. It automatically learns what is important to you and surfaces the correct link on search. It has a ton of other knowledge management features too.
I use Firefox bookmarks and use FF sync to make them available on all platforms. For organization, I keep them in a weird, organically grown folder structure that makes sense to me. If I really can't find something I use bookmark search on desktop Firefox. I occasionally make backups to my file server when I remember. It's an 80/20 solution that works well enough.
A big folder hierarchy of bookmarks works just fine for me and I get reference value from them practically every day, so it's not just unnecessary hoarding as the armchair psychologists imply.
The thing that solved bookmark annoyance for me is having them actually synced between all my devices. Having bookmarks trapped on specific devices is very annoying.
Readwise.io and its tagging feature are what I've been using for the past couple of years to save pages for later reading (displacing Feedly). The paid version has:
- a built-in RSS reader
- an easy-to-use tagging feature that you can use from the browser extension
- a nice text-to-speech reader — on the elliptical machine I listen to articles that I've saved for that purpose from Twitter, HN, etc.
At work, I made a webpage to organize common links I need. Internal stuff that can’t be searched for with search engines. For lesser used stuff, I might put it in my notes with information around what it’s for and how to use it in context.
At home I just have a few I use for convenience for the sites I use often.
I looked at how one might apply some order to them. It felt as if a revisit to the site would be needed, but then you need to classify it, which might not be relevant. Maybe it is a valid job for AI?
I always found it odd that sites like Reddit were sometimes called social bookmarking sites. I don’t know anyone using Reddit the way people used del.icio.us.
You could give https://raindrop.io a look. I tried it briefly when I missed del.icio.us. It didn’t stick for me, but your mileage may vary.
There are many tools. Save-and-triage with Todoist, tag and search with Pocket, knowledge management tools galore.
I’m going to strawman a bit here, this might not be your issue, but I think it’s useful because this is a common pathology. The tool isn’t the problem. The problem is the underlying FOMO. You can’t read everything. You’re not going to read everything even if you bookmark it in the perfect app.
What if, instead of bookmarking, you scheduled time in your calendar for reading it to the extent you felt you’d extracted optimal value from that resource? How many hours a week would you dedicate? How many pages would that imply?—and how does that compare with your bookmarking appetite?
Anyway the better thing was here all along, it’s just only recently even enabled by multimodal retrieval: screenshots
I heard Pinboard was great, and gave it a try. It's $20 upfront, but I was convinced to pay and try because they advertised you could get your money back within a week if it didn't work for you. It genuinely wasn't a good fit for me, but despite asking several times for a refund or a reply at least, I got no responses. Very frustrating experience. Warning to others considering giving it a try.
I don't get lazy when it comes to categorizing. Yeah, that simple. I have hundreds of links on my bookmarks bar (in dozens of folders) and I know what every one of them leads to and why, because I gave many of them a good title. Many are fine as is, but it's important to explain to yourself why it's there.
The only obstacle you have is this pile of garbage that you can't even categorize without plowing through it once. Just do it. You're not that busy. Once you get the folder tree, it becomes much easier. It also outlines your interests and helps with removing links that are "too much" or "too weak" for a specific folder or aren't really your thing at all.
If a page contains a useful N-liner, it just goes into "one big text file" repo and doesn't get bookmarked.
I've been on the web since late 1993. It feels great to bookmark and that's the most useful part of bookmarking. Organizing bookmarks is an odious chore with negative return...If I have to search my bookmarks, it is faster and more efficient to search the web.
Saving bookmarks feels productive, it isn't. It is just easier than doing the thing I am saving them to do.
To put it another way, not organizing bookmarks is not a moral failing. Good luck.
Most of the time I used bookmarks to either "read it later" or to "look it up again". In both cases I often desperately tried to find a specific bookmark in a collection of unsorted crap. After organizing them into topics / folders / subfolders, it worked a bit better, but I still had the same problem: How to find the one piece of information I'm looking for in a whole bunch of unsorted content? And what if that has changed or become unavailable somehow (except via archive.org).
These days I use a knowledge collection (flatnotes, but Notion, Obsidian or Logseq would work just fine). If a bookmark is only short content (let's say an interesting git solution or a quick fix for something), I immedeately "extract" this piece of information into my knowledge base in a well organized markdown with headlines including a reference to the URL. If it is a "read later" thing, I invest at least 2 Minutes to write a short summary (2 sentences), what the article is about and what I expect it to help my with.
This has proven to work MUCH better to organize "bookmarks" and informational content. Bookmarks are just for backup now.
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