
Show HN: We made an awesome way to browse and search your Chrome bookmarks. - bwm
http://stashmarks.com
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rheeseyb
Great work guys! not something I would have originally seen myself using, but
having now tested it out I can see this replacing my bookmarks bar! Search
could do with improving but I'm sure you'll sort that ;) any chance of viewing
bookmarks that are the union or intersection of two tags/folders? I think that
is something that would change how I organised my bookmarks, but would be
useful to me personally (and I'd bet a whole bunch of other users).

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cobychapple
Union/intersection could be quite useful for me too, FWIW. Might confuse the
whole tag selection UI side of things (with requiring a 'clear selection' or
'clear this selected tag' type functionality too—just my $0.02.

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SkyMarshal
Cool idea, chrome/ium bookmark manager is definitely a pain point. But I can't
tell, is this a local extension, or does it upload bookmarks and stuff to your
server?

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cskau
Exactly my concern. But judging from some of the other comments it is indeed
uploading your bookmarks.

I'm sorry to say, but I consider bookmarks slightly private, and I wouldn't
want just any company to look over my shoulder and read all the pages I
bookmark.

While the product seems awesome I'm going to have to pass.

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jfmercer
Excellent work. I've wanted to have better bookmark management in Chrome for a
while now. Plus the design is beautiful.

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ericmsimons
Okay, I know I'm joining the choir here, but THANK YOU. THANK YOU THANK YOU
THANK YOU. This is EXACTLY what I need. I am so sick of the omnibar not being
able to find websites I've bookmarked because it can't search the HTML of the
website. I don't want to use evernote either, it needs to just work.

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slewis
Definitely awesome. I'm surprised that all of my bookmarks say "This bookmark
is being indexed". Surely you've already indexed a lot of them as they
probably overlap with other Hacker News users. Do you index every bookmark for
every user or can you detect dupes?

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aik
This looks great. Will try it out.

Just FYI -- I found the shaky window upon inputting an incorrect password very
annoying and disorienting. I just wanted to reenter my password but wasn't
able to because the window was still shaking.

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nc
Just turned that off :)

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aik
Cool. It could be a useful visual metaphor as long as the shake was smaller
and didn't last as long (didn't affect usability).

So I created an account and the site has now been stuck on "We're uploading
your bookmarks." for the past 3 hours at the bar about 3/5 of the way done.

Edit: I have since refreshed and now it's stuck at 0.

~~~
chromedude
I had the same problem, but what fixed it was I uninstalled it and installed
it direct from the webstore
([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kdcfbakjhnnjcjdcle...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kdcfbakjhnnjcjdcledhhcmhejepgnkf?utm_source=chrome-
ntp-icon)) After doing that it worked like a charm.

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jasonlotito
Not a big bug, but... after login, it said it was uploading my bookmarks, and
then said I didn't have any. Though, going back to the home page, it showed me
my bookmarks. Just a heads up. Otherwise, looks cool.

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doubleconfess
I've been looking for something like this lately, it really fills a need for
me!

But you really REALLY need to modify your icon. There are a million bookmarked
shaped icons in this world, and for some reason no-one ever incorporates a
mark with the bookmark icon so that it can be differentiated. So now on chrome
I have 2 bookmark icons that look identical (the other is for 'read it
later'), and two other ones that relate to bookmarks but are stars. Great.

~~~
nc
Hmm, what if we made it orange like the logo? would that fix it?

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GrumpySimon
This is fantastic! I've got so many damn bookmarks that I don't know what to
do with them. Have you got any plans for importing bookmarks from
pinboard/delicious?

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idm
This looks really nice, but I'd like to hear what the account is required for.
I'm not happy with the idea of another third-party having a peek inside my
bookmarks.

Maybe accounts shouldn't be strictly required, but would permit a fuller range
of service? At any rate, I've hit a brick wall, because I am hesitant to go
any further.

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bwm
I understand your concern, and to be honest we thought about this a lot when
making the product. The reason we upload your bookmarks to our server is so
that we can download the html, index it and display excerpts in the timeline.
For further information, you can read our privacy policy here:
<http://stashmarks.com/privacy>

~~~
idm
Thanks for your reply; I suspected as much. Well, I hope there aren't too many
people like myself who will be turned off by the account creation step.
However, I'm going to have to sit out this round until a decentralized option
is available from you guys. Nice product, all the same!

~~~
lkesteloot
I installed the extension, saw the account creation form, and uninstalled the
extension. I agree, I don't need another server somewhere downloading the
pages I bookmark. Some of them are even on the intranet at work. Could this
work entirely within the extension? Or could I opt out of the HTML-search
feature and use the other features?

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Hates_
I hate to go off topic, but what browser were the screenshots made in? I love
the clean border/top bar.

~~~
nc
Kudos to Kerem Suer for releasing this awesome freebie those shots were based
on <http://dribbble.com/shots/395812-Chrome-freebie-PSD->

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ComputerGuru
Are you guys down under the load?

It cycles on the "uploading bookmarks" page for a couple of minutes (I only
have 50 or so!) and then

 _An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served.
Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details._

~~~
chromedude
They are under major load - just check out the tweet stream:
<https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/stashmarks>

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dmmalam
Awesome works guys! It's a shame that I stopped using bookmarks years ago, cos
I could usually google the result much quicker.

Though this UI might change that! Will deffo try it out!

Any thoughts on twitter favs, which a lot of users (including me) misuse as a
booking marking service.

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bwm
Thanks! No plans yet, but there is an API which you can use to post bookmarks
to.

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tricolon
I couldn't find another way to contact you, so here goes. There's an
extraneous apostrophe in "This bookmark is pending download, until then it's
summary will not be available". In fact, that comma should be a semicolon.

Thank you for creating a service I needed.

~~~
nc
Oh yes, good spot. Thanks for checking it out.

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brewerja
Anyone have this working in Linux? I get the error, "Sorry, we couldn't
connect to your browser." I have the extension installed and enabled.

UPDATE: Seems to be working when installed from the Chrome Web Store, rather
than the link on the site.

~~~
drewschrauf
I'm on Windows and this fixed the same issue for me.

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Cpt_Monac
Looks great! If I can begin asking for feature requests, I never noticed how
many of my bookmarks lacked appropriate tags :) Would it be possible to add or
edit the tags of the bookmarks in future versions?

~~~
bwm
Yup this is definitely a possibility.

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samgro
Beautiful service - I've wanted this for a while. My bookmarks all show up,
but when I search for anything I get no results. Looks like you guys still
have a few kinks to work out...

~~~
nc
Thanks! It's probably still indexing you're bookmarks, we're working on it.

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jurre
Looks really awesome. I want to note I had to restart Chrome to get it to work
though (before it was hanging at the 'we're uploading your bookmarks' part).

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pie
Great job. Looks like you're getting hammered with traffic right now, but I'm
curious how this holds up with a few synchronized instances of Chrome.

~~~
bwm
as long as you have the extension installed, everything you bookmark will be
available in the service, regardless of which instance of chrome it came from.

~~~
pie
Right - but I am curious about how Stashmarks handles conflict resolution, if
it does. I naively assume it simply de-dupes URLs, meaning unexpected things
could happen with multiple Chromes that aren't running sync or have updates
queued while working offline. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

(I also agree with the comment below that it's an edge case for most users,
especially Chrome sync users.)

~~~
bwm
URLs uniquely identify bookmarks, if two chromes have a bookmark with the same
URL but different titles/tags, stashmarks will show whichever was synced
first.

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pie
Right - I'm finding that this behavior (or something related to
identification) makes it finnicky to update title/tags, and changes I make in
the browser don't always seem to apply, even after resetting the connection.

If I edit a URL, stashmarks doesn't reflect the change in the UI, at least
when the original is still pending download. Looks like it's actually changed
internally.

Also, I can't delete (or edit) a bookmark in stashmarks that I no longer have
saved in my browser. Recreating it and deleting that does nothing, even when
logged out and then in.

Hope these critiques are helpful.

Clearly, these are all edge cases, and overall your service is impressive.

~~~
bwm
Thanks for the feedback, it's very helpful. We're aware that there are still a
couple of quirks with the extension. We'll try to get some management in the
web app soon. In the meantime if you're still having problems, feel free to
mail us at support@mech.io.

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andrewfelix
So far so good. Although could we get a more logical hierarchy? I would like
to see my 'favourite' bookmarks at the top somehow.

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kmfrk
Your site is on the brink of going down, guys. Not there yet, but I get the
occasional server error.

Might want to make sure it stays up. :)

~~~
bwm
cheers, it was our search feature that was killing performance, we've had to
put it a dumber search for now.

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tedmiston
A little beside the point, but you have one of the best marketing sites for a
HN project I've seen in a long time.

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gary_r
Looks great. Will definitely give it a go. One thing to note, your "Forgot
password" link appears to be broken

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famoreira
Nice work guys! I'm getting some error though. I think you guys should pump it
up the dynos :)

~~~
nc
Just did!

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swah
Looks cool, thought of doing something similar myself. Why don't you charge
like pinbord?

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bostonvaulter2
I can only get a cogwheel and can't find any support link.

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kareena86
This is pretty cool. Does it work on safari?

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bwm
sorry, it's Chrome only atm. But if enough people ask for it, we'll build a
Safari extension.

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webwanderings
As much as I wish to see Google Chrome (and Firefox) update their bookmarks
manager....I cannot really trust a third party service for my local bookmarks.

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earwolf
great. the stock search crashes my chrome every time.

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xqo
Hey OP This looked really cool, so i installed it. Then it asked me to log in,
and I uninstalled it right away. I want a nice bookmarks-handler, but i dont
wanna log in to your shit.

~~~
rheeseyb
But you made the effort to sign up for a HN account purely to post this
comment? <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xqo>

Fair play you might not want to log in but the whole point in this service (I
believe) is that it's synced across all of your Chrome instances, hence the
need to sign in.

Alternative question (assuming their gonna start charging because otherwise
they're operating a going-out-of-business model), would you pay for this if
they were to make it a lightweight plug in that doesn't require signing in and
doesn't sync across your various Chrome instances?

