
Show HN: Espial: an open-source, web-based bookmarking server - platz
https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
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mindcrash
I strongly recommend changing your UI layout before Maciej finds out.

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platz
? This codebase and assets are entirely and 100% my own, written from scratch.

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darekkay
It may be written from scratch, but you _did_ copy the design. IANAL, but such
a basic design "inspiration" should not lead to legal issues, though.

Does your project offer any advantage over the obvious competitor, apart from
being open-source/self-hosted?

Shameless plug: I have also written a bookmarking app[0], which goes a
different route: I like to manage my bookmarks in plain text files instead of
collecting thousands of links I probably won't ever get to see again.

[0] - [https://staticmarks.com/](https://staticmarks.com/)

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platz
> Does your project offer any advantage over the obvious competitor, apart
> from being open-source/self-hosted?

When you have over 67,000 bookmarks, as i do, I feel open-source/self-hosted
becomes a higher priority due to for data ownership and performance reasons.

By moving to self-hosted, i was able to bring down my "cold-start"/"non-
cached" wait time on tag filters from 30s to ~1s.

> I like to manage my bookmarks in plain text files

I think that's a great idea and definitely see the value in going that route.

Obviously, it's a different place in the design place. Hosting & deployment is
much easier of course. Though workflow for adding new bookmarks seems more
manual e.g. can you add new marks while on your mobile phone, quickly?

My use case may be a bit different, as i add marks as part of browsing for
things i want to return to later in the day, and also for long-term recall or
aggregation when researching a topic, with as low/minimal-effort as possible

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darekkay
> By moving to self-hosted, i was able to bring down my "cold-start"/"non-
> cached" wait time on tag filters from 30s to ~1s.

I think highlighting the good performance is worth mentioning on your
project's page (maybe with some stats).

> Obviously, it's a different place in the design place. Hosting & deployment
> is much easier of course. Though workflow for adding new bookmarks seems
> more manual e.g. can you add new marks while on your mobile phone, quickly?

This is exactly the reason why I did not write an easier way to add the
bookmarks other than editing a text file. Because I don't want to end up
having 67.000 bookmarks. I have an "inbox" folder in my browser where I put
all the stuff I think is interesting. I later review them and either 1.) turn
them into an actionable task in my todo manager 2.) delete them after finding
out it's really not that interesting (most of them) or 3.) put it in my
bookmarks file if I think this is something worth archiving. The last one does
not happen very often, though.

As you said, this is a much different use case than yours. I get how most
people go your route, but it does not work for me. It encourages my fear of
missing out: "oh, this is an article about XXX. let's archive it for later".
But if I ever decide I want to learn about XXX, the article might be outdated
and I might as well just search for a new up-to-date source (especially being
a frontend developer, where yesterday's info is already outdated). However, I
can see how such a system really shines when doing research.

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platz
> I think highlighting the good performance is worth mentioning on your
> project's page

AFAICT most folks don't have more than a couple thousand at the high end, so
they probably don't run into these perf issues — although it was my
motivation, it's probably not relevant to them.

Also, I totally get how your workflow makes sense—especially for fast-moving
topics like FE dev, where there may be more value in just doing a new google
search/source.

I also really like tagging over hierarchy. Again just highlights the different
use cases we have. If i get really crazy, I might try experimenting with more
interesting tagging methods or apply some ML techniques.)

Still, re-using the filesystem is very clever idea, and has a bunch of
advantages, not discussed yet.

