
Show HN: Reminiscence, self-hosted bookmark manager and personal wayback machine - kanishkalinux
https://github.com/kanishka-linux/reminiscence
======
dqv
I've needed self-hosted bookmarks for a while. There are some written in Java
and PHP, but they just don't seem very approachable.

This is a great project. Here are some things I noticed that set this project
apart from others:

1) Detailed (up-to-date!!) documentation for installation. Sometimes you have
difficulties installing a project because either the documentation is out of
date or just excludes important details. Not true here - you create the
virtualenv and run the scripts. There is nothing esoteric about setting up
this project to use.

2) It's on the latest version of Django. It can be a little discouraging to
use a project that is running on a version of a library that is no longer
supported.

3) It doesn't require redis or nginx to run out of the box. It works as
expected without these things, which means I was able to test the project
simply by installing the python dependencies.

4) The interface is simple to use.

5) Project can be scaled up with celery.

6) Full disclosures about problems one may run into with this project and how
to address them.

It took me 1 minute to install this project. I didn't encounter any errors.
THIS is how you get people to use your project.

The _only_ thing I can say is that the interface needs a little improvement,
but this is so easy to over look with such a functional project.

Thank you kanishka-linux for creating this project.

~~~
kanishkalinux
That was amazing feedback! Thanks a lot!

About user-interface, I agree it needs improvement. Especially inbuilt reader
needs some work.

Can you suggest some improvements in UI?

~~~
dqv
Most of this is personal preference for me, so I would take what I'm saying
with a grain of salt.

There are some spacing issues here and there - the username/settings drop down
next to the search input is not vertically aligned with the rest of the
elements. The create new directory form and add URL form is pushed to the
right a bit. I'd either center those or keep them aligned left.

One thing I'd try is making the create new directory part into a pop over. It
would actually _increase_ the time to create a new directory (additional
click/tab), but in my case it'd be okay since I would be creating new ones so
infrequently. The idea is a "new directory" button with that form in a pop
over when active.

I'd consider using list elements instead of a table for the directory listing
and link listing.

For the directory listing, I'd experiment with replacing the links
count/action dropdown with something right next to or immediately below the
link to the directory. i.e.

    
    
        MyDirectory <link icon> 3 • rename • remove
    

With more emphasis (using styles) on the name of the directory. Hovering over
<link icon> 3 could have a title attr that said something like "3 links in
MyDirectory".

But the project works fine and the UI isn't really taking too much away from
using it.

~~~
kanishkalinux
Pretty detailed suggestions! Thanks. I'll keep them in mind when iterating on
next version of the project.

------
dmix
A chrome extension would be necessary for something like this to replace
Pinboard/Instapaper for me (I see that in the TODO already). But looks good
otherwise. The only thing stopping me is the time commitment of hosting
another app for personal use.

~~~
nusbit
Why do you want to replace Pinboard/Instapaper? What feature do you miss?

~~~
aiyodev
I don’t think they archive links. They only bookmark them. Am I wrong?

~~~
sp332
Pinboard has an archive option at a higher subscription level.

~~~
viraptor
Where higher is still a ridiculously cheap $25/yr

~~~
atmosx
And you don’t have to care about disaster recovery, backup and upgrades? If I
were half-serious about my bookmarks, I’d pay that much. I am not though and
pinboard free account is enough.

~~~
sp332
Not just that, but also link rot. In five years how many of those URLs will
still have useful info on them?

(I didn't even know pinboard had free accounts.)

~~~
atmosx
IIRC, I paid a small fee once, 10$ or something, but even when the website
changed to subscription only, I was never asked to pay additional fee.

------
kickscondor
This is cool. I am going to try this out. See also webrecorder.io.

I want a record button in my browser bar that I can leave on!

~~~
kanishkalinux
Thanks. I didn't know about webrecorder. It also looks cool. I'll look into
it.

~~~
akavel
You might also be interested in
[https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb](https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb), the author
of webrecorder is a major contributor to this.

~~~
kanishkalinux
It looks quite innovative. I'll see if I can get some ideas from it.

------
aklemm
Exciting! I'm still badly in need of a bookmark manager (and hopefully sync-
capable) since xmarks shutdown. I'm looking at Shiori, ymarks, and Floccus.
How does Reminiscence compare?

~~~
kanishkalinux
Reminiscence has some advance features like auto-tagging, auto-summarization
and archiving in various formats, which separates it from other bookmark
managers. Few days back, I posted it on r/selfhosted and there one fellow
redditor suggested to contact Floccus dev, instead to writing bookmark addon
for every browser. Hopefully, I'll get in touch with the Floccus dev and will
see if it can support Reminiscence in some form or other.

------
tjwds
I love this and love that it's built in Python, but…

"Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard"[0]

[0]
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...](https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious/)

~~~
prepend
I like Pinboard and think it’s a great service.

Personally, I don’t like services for software. I like this model where I pay
for my own hosting (which I do already) and run OSS software for free. To me,
the DIY model is suitable and sustainable for user level programmers.

------
seltzered_
very cool. may also be worth mentioning the difference between this and
projects like shaarli, [https://github.com/pirate/bookmark-
archiver](https://github.com/pirate/bookmark-archiver) , etc.

~~~
superkuh
Thanks fo linking bookmark-archiver here. I liked the sound of reminiscence
but unfortunately it requires bleeding edge python and tries to integrate the
webserver (and many other things that don't need to be). It's a matter of
taste I suppose but I couldn't get it working. bookmark-archiver just works on
all my systems, old and new.

~~~
kitdarko
How is 3.5+ bleeding edge? It's been out for more than 3 years, and is
installed by default on most current OS releases.

I personally only support the latest stable release, so I only support 3.7.

Python is extremely backwards-compatible so there's never been any breakages
for me, from 3.4 to 3.5 to 3.6 to 3.7.

------
j45
Nice. Are there plans to add saving of annotations (highlighting text and
string to the link) like Diigo? Annotations seem to remain a elusive feature
in a self hosted solution.

~~~
kanishkalinux
Thanks! I'll add support for annotations in project's TODO list. It'll be a
nice addition to any archiving solution.

~~~
j45
Starred the project, look forward to it. This is the only feature that has me
tied to using a hosted solution, instead of a self-hosted solution.

------
peterwwillis
I love the idea, but is this a little bit overkill if you just want to mirror
your bookmarks? There's several simple spidering tools out there that you
could change the User-Agent on in order to get mobile or desktop pages, and
then you don't need to maintain or run any servers or special tools. I would
export my bookmarks, run a cron job on them with a spider tool, and commit the
result to Git.

~~~
jjnoakes
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

~~~
icebraining
Not really the same, as setting up Reminiscence seems to be fairly involved as
well.

------
emayljames
HTTrack is something that has been around for years and can rewrite the pages
it downloads to internal links to the archived webpage.

~~~
kanishkalinux
I think, wget is even better and much older than it.

~~~
emayljames
Ah thanks. HTTrack would be easier for those not educated in the command line
though.

~~~
kanishkalinux
By the way, this application is not just about archiving. For regular
archiving wget (and in your case HTTrack), are more than sufficient.
Reminiscence has been developed for bookmarking, archiving, organizing and
access from anywhere.

------
fit2rule
I have a ghetto version of this - I just print web pages to PDF, and then
archive the PDF locally to storage. I have every website of interest to me
I've ever read since 1997 saved this way - and can harvest a lot of data from
the 16,000+ PDF files I now have.

Beats me why this isn't just a normal feature in the browser. No need for no
stinkin' SAAS to do it ..

~~~
marttt
I like the robustness of this type of solutions, so here's a bunch of
questions:

Do you also use a folder hierarchy for separate topics, and-or a file naming
scheme?

And have you scripted the pdf generation to an extent, or is everything done
by hand? (I suppose manual saving and pdf naming might work as a fairly nice
"bullshit filter", at least for some period.)

How much time does it usually take for you to store a link that way?

~~~
fit2rule
Folder hierarchy: nope. Just 15k+ files in a sub-directory. There is a reason
for this: its just so convenient to grep for a subject I'm interested in,
thus:

    
    
        $ ls -l |  grep "hacker news"
    

PDF Generation scripted? Also no. This is just a print-to-pdf hotkey away, no
need to script it. The PDF names come from the title of the web page, so its
sometimes necessary to adjust this and make my own title, but only about 2% of
the time.

Time to store? As much time as it takes to print most web pages to PDF - i.e.
mere seconds.

And there is so much data to be harvested in the collection - best of all, its
all mine. No third-party gets to see it, collate the data, see where my
interests are, sell me things, etc.

------
wolco
I would love the ability to bookmark an entire site. Does this allow full
spidering?

~~~
kanishkalinux
Currently, it does not allow full spidering.

------
tempaccount777
What do you do if the page has videos and gifs? Does this support those?

~~~
kanishkalinux
About videos, I'm thinking about providing some way to add custom user
scripts, so that users can use their favorite download manager to download
media elements from site.

About gif, they are will be included in the archived page. Everything with
'img' tag will be fetched for archiving.

