

Gimme Bar: Don't bookmark the web. Save it. Forever. - aeurielesn
https://gimmebar.com

======
scottjackson
I use Gimme Bar and love it. I also use Pinboard.

Pinboard I use for pointers to things - GitHub projects that might come in
handy in the future, development/design resources, particularly interesting
Wikipedia articles, and other things like interviews and magazine articles.

But there's some stuff that I want to keep. I used to have a `~/box` folder on
my Mac where I'd keep pictures, quotes, and screenshots of web pages I really
liked. I wanted to keep them locally so that I would always have a copy of
them. However, there were problems with this. By just keeping pictures as
files, I couldn't always easily find where the picture came from (not without
coming up with a complicated naming scheme or moving away from the simplicity
of just having files in a folder). I kept quotes in plain text, so attribution
was difficult for them, too — I needed to be able to capture quotes quickly,
so I didn't have time to also store the URL the quote came from. And
screenshots of webpages aren't exactly interactive — if I wanted to look at
some HTML to see how something was done on the page, too bad. I also didn't
have a pretty way to look at all the things I'd wanted to keep. All I had was
a Finder window.

I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there
(I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of
interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to
save one image or one choice sentence from the page. Besides, if I archive the
whole page, how can I indicate which image/quote I wanted to save in the first
place? Long story short, Pinboard's archiving isn't quite what I want (though,
like I said, I've been thinking about switching it on for backing up
interviews).

Gimme Bar is basically the best of all those worlds. I can save images,
videos, quotes, and site designs. I can easily see where the image/quote/etc.
came from. The site gives me a purdy way of looking at them. And integration
with Dropbox means I always have a local copy of everything. Gimme Bar lets me
have my cake, eat it, _and_ have my cake stored in Dropbox (I may be
stretching this metaphor).

Anyway, I really, _really_ like Gimme Bar.

~~~
gwern
> I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send
> there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies
> of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just
> want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page.

Hard drive space is cheap, cheaper than your own time when you discover you
want context or perhaps some other choice sentence from that page. The best
solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.

(My own current solution-hack is _two_ parallel systems: manual Evernotes for
specific quotes or photos, and an automatic archive system that downloads the
entire page: <http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs> So I consult one or the
other as appropriate.)

~~~
scottjackson
> The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of
> interest.

Agreed. That's definitely something I'd love to see Gimme Bar do: in addition
to showing me the quote I pulled out of the page, also give me the option to
see the full page, with the text I quoted highlighted.

------
scoates
Of note: we (Fictive Kin, fictivekin.com) created Gimme Bar. We also created
LeakedIn (leakedin.org) which is currently sharing the front page.

Thanks for the busy two days of dev-ops scrambling, friends. (-:

Let's try to keep DDoSing to a lower level than yesterday, though, please. (-:

S

~~~
aristus
Congrats!

Many years ago I worked on a similar idea: first a desktop archiver called
Dowser, and an online app called Archivd.

If you don't have enough to do (heh) one killer feature is to extract semi-
structured data: email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, prices,
photos, Facebook "og" metadata, etc. Imagine saving a bunch of apartment
listings to GimmeBar, and having it automatically plot them on a map of the
city.

Good luck!

~~~
jperras
We actually have some stuff in place to do things like that.

It's currently limited in scope to things like recipes and a few other things,
but it's very much on our radar as being useful.

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vdm
Pinboard archives each bookmark as a premium feature. I have used it several
dozen times since I signed up.

[http://blog.pinboard.in/2010/11/bookmark_archives_that_don_t...](http://blog.pinboard.in/2010/11/bookmark_archives_that_don_t/)

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mikecane
I'm unconvinced. I used FURL, which saved actual web pages. Then FURL was sold
to diigo and they killed all that -- actually wiping out everything I saved
and just leaving the URL (like a frikkin neutron bomb acquisition!). I'm not
going through that again. Good luck otherwise.

~~~
scoates
Hi.

You make a good point. We've gone to great lengths to ensure this doesn't
happen. One of those lengths is that you can export your entire library to
Dropbox. This protects you against us failing or being stupid in other ways.

S

~~~
dmd
"This app will have access to your entire Dropbox."

Uh, no. Why do you need access to my entire Dropbox? That's bad. You should
request access only to /Apps/Gimmebar.

(I'd submit this as feedback, but your bottom right 'feedback' thing is broken
- on submit, you get a blank page.)

~~~
scoates
Hi.

You're right. That is bad. We added Dropbox support before Dropbox allowed
per-directory sandboxing. We're on it (but we also have a huge number of
things to do). This does have a fairly high priority.

Thanks for pointing it our (and understanding).

S

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toyg
Like Pinterest, Gimme Bar will quickly fall afoul of copyright lawyers.
Copying content outright and _re-serving it from your own systems_... not
good.

~~~
mitchty
If its for your own purposes I don't see why its any different than
archive.org. The intent isn't to make money, just archival.

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Gring
Looks nice, but that dropbox-export is not enough futureproofing for me. When
I rely on something like this, I need to be sure it will keep automatically
existing even if any one company goes down.

In your case, I should not have to manually initiate the dropbox backup, and
it should not rely exclusively on one cloud provider.

So there sould be something like a RAIC (redundant array of independent
clouds) and then your service would be provided on top of that.

With those changes (which are non-trivial, unfortunately), I would happily use
the service.

~~~
regularfry
How many services do that? I can't think of any.

~~~
Gring
Yes, there probably aren't any at this time. I'm just outlining my main points
of critique to suggest further improvements.

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gwillen
Don't talk to me about "forever". There is no forever. There is only "until we
get bought and shut the service down."

Fix _that_ problem, and _then_ I'll consider using your service.

~~~
jaredsohn
They store files on your Dropbox. Granted, there is no guarantee that Dropbox
will last forever but there aren't guarantees on most (all?) things lasting
forever and Dropbox will sync the files to your local disk.

~~~
Auguste
I'm not really comfortable with giving them access to my entire Dropbox. They
don't seem to be using the restricted apps directory, unfortunately.

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lxyu
Seems very like evernote webclipper.

<http://evernote.com/webclipper/>

~~~
calydon
I think their landing page needs to indicate how they are different from
Evernote. The ability to 'find cool new stuff' is intriguing - a bit like
Stumbleupon + Evernote then?

Also there needs to be a way to contact someone and/or ask questions and/or
provide feedback. An Olark tab would work.

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nodrama
The voice is really hard to understand. Too low and the way it reads is
annoying.

It seems that you can use Dropbox in some way but I didn't understand if it
can save directly on a local folder (no login required) or you have to login
every time.

I use ScrapBook to save whole webpages.

I haven't tried it yet but I think you can save webpages to your Dropbox
folder and have them everywhere.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/>

~~~
pud
I thought the video was (relatively) amazing. It was funny and cool and not
overly douchy and/or nerdy like other demo videos.

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lo_fye
Gimmebar pulls a Readability. When you share content from Gimmebar, it shares
a shortlink to the content on Gimmebar, not the source URL. Sure seems like
content/value/traffic theft to me.

~~~
preinheimer
When you share content from gimmebar, they're no longer sure the original
source is still displaying the item in question, or even that the URI chosen
was canonical (think the root url on a blog). What choice do they have?

To go a step further, I think you're freeing the person sharing the content
prematurely. If I see something funny on cracked.com, and decide to grab that
content, upload it to imagur, then share the imagur link… Imagur getting the
traffic instead of cracked is on me, not imagur.

~~~
lo_fye
i guess they could put a hoverbar at the top of the page when they link to the
original content. if there's a 404 or redirect, the user can click the
hoverbar to see gimmebar's copy.

i'm not sure how to do it, exactly, but i know it's possible to do this in a
way that isn't so... swipey.

~~~
preinheimer
How do you know you're seeing the wrong content?

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narag
What's that? A plugin? JS? Will I be able to install it in Seamonkey in
Windows? I can't tell by its web.

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tommypalm
I've been a Gimmebar user for months. Pro user for about 1 month. The redesign
(currently available to Pro users) is great.

The difference between Gimmebar and lots of other similar services is your
ability to bookmark anything you find, which is great for doing things like a
moodboard for a project.

------
BigTigger
Seems like a cool idea,

I watched the video but it hasn't convinced me why gimme bar is better than my
current bookmark system in Chrome with folders etc. to be honest, I quite like
my bookmark bar at the top

All the video did was told me that gimme bar is better, but not why it is.

~~~
dasil003
It saves the content so it doesn't matter if the original goes away. FWIW, I
learned this from the video, hadn't used the product or even heard of it
before.

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dybber
Seems nice, though a bit slow.

When copying quotes it would be even nicer if you could keep the formatting
from the website. Bold text, lists etc. should be preserved when presented on
your site.

I thought the screenshot feature could have been a useful alternative, but for
certain pages it doesn't really work: [http://inoveryourhead.net/20-things-i-
should-have-known-at-2...](http://inoveryourhead.net/20-things-i-should-have-
known-at-20/) \- I'm not sure it can be solved in general. Maybe it is
possible to run it through readability before taking the screenshot.

~~~
kirbysayshi
If you really want quotes and things to be presented in the same formatting as
the site, you might want to try Citational. It fills a different role than
GimmieBar, in that it's meant for one-shot sharing instead of an archive. But
it does let you highlight text or an image and show it in context:
<https://citational.com/v/5mf/15-learn-to-cook>

(Yes, I built it... )

------
rglover
Gimme Bar is brilliant. I've been using it for awhile now and can't offer
enough applause. I use it for two main reasons: gathering and collecting
inspiration (specifically via their discovery stream) and having a visual
reference library (as a designer it's great for saving color palettes,
fonts/typography, and other resources).

Sign up, connect it to your Twitter, follow some interesting folks, and hit
the discovery stream. I'll talk to you in a couple hours.

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keithgibson
Evernote + pinterest, right?

~~~
B-Scan
Yeah, something like <http://clipboard.com/>

------
jongold
GimmeBar is fantastic - used it for a while for images & design inspiration;
using it now for most of my bookmarks as well (cool Gems/plugins to check out,
quotes, bits of articles etc).

Thanks FictiveKin for being amazing :)

(also - syncs via Dropbox to my hard drive. That's forever enough for me)

------
shelf
I use a really hackish perl script to wget, diff, and wget -r websites in this
way, because articles disappear way too much for my liking. This product looks
wonderful and I'll be playing around with the API as soon as I have a spare
moment. Thankyou for this.

~~~
shelf
Hmm. A few more minutes with this has me a little mixed. I may have confused
this with some kind of personal mirror service. Is there a way to mirror an
entire page? (Recursively --no-parent is ideal, usually.) Even backing up the
plain HTML without images would be suitable. Text is formatted usually.

A great product nonetheless. It will replace a cocktail of pastebins +
image/binary uploaders for me, in many cases. The screenshots are most
definitely useful. For articles where formatting and sublinks are important, I
may need to keep using my silly wget routine.

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CWuestefeld
I look at the page and see nothing but a flash video. Nothing there at all to
tell me what the service is.

Are you going to force me to take the time to sit through a flash video to
learn about your product? Seems like a very unnecessary barrier to me.

~~~
sangaya
Directly under the flash video: "Save the Web Don’t bookmark the web. Save it.
Gimme Bar doesn’t just keep bookmarks; it stores items in your personal
library in the cloud. You can even back things up to Dropbox."

Seems to state the purpose and expected usage scenario quite clearly. The
Terms of Service at the bottom also has a good description of how they handle
Copyright issues which I would think is likely to be the big issue. I.e. if I
"save" a favorite video to the site, can it disappear a year later due to some
copyright complaint? The answer is yes.

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jstalin
Please create a Firefox add-on. I don't like using the bookmarks bar at all.

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jameswyse
This is actually very well done, I've already signed up for the pro account
and was happily surprised to find an improved UI waiting for me. Cool!

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webwanderings
No About section?

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marbleint
Great idea, I love it. But serious, to all those doing their on
voiceovers...BUY A DECENT MIC. They are 30 USD max

~~~
anigbrowl
It sounds fine to me, and I've worked in pro audio for over a decade. Maybe
too bassy for your speakers?

 _They are 30 USD max_

If only :-)

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voltagex_
Should I move from Delicious to this? What are the advantages of this over
that?

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g3orge
looks good... What do the pro accounts offer and how much do they cost?

I used to use LittleSnapper when I had a mac, but now that I'm on Linux, I
just take screenshots of stuff. I'll give it a try.

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navs
Their backup to dropbox feature is pretty nifty.

~~~
BigTigger
I backup to my Google account with my Chrome so I don't see the difference.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
There's a huge difference between saving the content itself, and a link to
something that is bound to disappear eventually.

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cristianocd
Cool, but evernote already does it all.

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hng
"...bookmarks are like myspace..." ehm no

