
Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks? - sniuff
Hi,<p>I have more than 200 bookmarks in my Chrome, I have tried different services to store them online,but every time I changed back to Chrome.<p>What do you use to store bookmarks?
======
lmorchard
Pinboard. 25441 bookmarks and counting, carried over from the 15000 or so I
imported from delicious a few years ago. <http://pinboard.in/u:deusx>

The thing is, though, how do you use bookmarks? I hoard everything and rely on
search. I feel like once you're over a dozen or so, that's what you need to
do. I long, long ago gave up trying to organize them by hand

I use my pinboard to collect links from my tweets and status updates posts,
and I use IFTTT and a to:fb tag to post from pinboard to facebook.

I also use a bookmarklet to post to pinboard with tags.

Later, I use pinboard as a personal search engine between tags and search
terms. Basically, everything I used to do with Delicious for years

------
ambirex
Short story, my own system with over 16k links.

Back in 2004 there a competing service to delicious called Furl
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furl>) it would save a snapshot of page you
were saving.

The only downside was it was slow so I modified the bookmarklet to point to my
own domain. I called my system Lruf (furl backwards) built with PHP and MySQL.

It worked well enough for a very long time, I would occasionally work on it.
It was built in a very 2004 way (logic and display intertwined)

I had added other features through out the years (tagging, rating, 404
checking, etc).

Last year I finally rewrote the entire system using a framework, I used
diffbot to extract the text from the page and opencalais to help with auto
tagging bookmarks. I switched search to use Solr.

It has been a nice little side project for the last 9 years.

------
citricsquid
<http://historio.us> \-- indexes the contents of pages allowing for search
based on page contents, not just domain or title. I have a small selection of
bookmarks I use repeatedly in the chrome bar thingy and then use historious
(with the chrome extension) for everything else. Saved me a lot of trouble
many times when I could only remember a fragment of the page contents I was
looking for.

------
TallboyOne
Kippt is really good for any type of bookmark.

I made my site <http://pineapple.io> specifically for all my development
bookmarks. Since then it's grown to be quite a nice awesome database. I
moderate it really heavily for quality, so if you skim all 100 pages I
guarantee you will find tons of hidden gems.

~~~
citricsquid
Thank you for Pineapple, it's such a wonderful resource, plus the design is
really great. Did you design and develop it yourself?

~~~
TallboyOne
Yessir! Did the entire thing myself :)

By the way... This may seem crazy but I knew I recognized your name. Someone
registered with your same username 6 months ago. Heh. Sometimes my memory is
awesome, and other days I can't remember what I did the day before.

<http://pineapple.io/profiles/citricsquid>

~~~
citricsquid
Very impressive, it would be very easy to pass the site off as something that
had an entire team of people behind it, everything is so well polished. Do you
have any long term plans for it?

That's me! Found it when you posted on reddit (<http://redd.it/yh6w3>) :D

~~~
TallboyOne
I have put my blood sweat and tears into it. Ever since being a kid I've
always wanted a site that lots and lots of people use.

My dream is coming true. It's extremely 'dear' to me, and as such I'm
continually developing it and trying to make the best possible experience for
users. There's a lot of content out there and I wanted a place to only show
the GOOD stuff, not the 1000's of pages of crap.

Long term goals are still in the air as far as my plans, but it definitely
will be with me for the long term, that's for sure :)

~~~
ipedrazas
"While Pineapple doesn't intend to be the next Facebook (whew!),"

What about the new Yahoo!? didn't know it but I'll give it a try :)

------
Amarandei
I always save my bookmarks in Firefox. To make sure I don't lose them next
time I reinstall Windows I use an add-on called FEBE that backs-up all my
bookmarks(among other things) into a directory. Next time I have a vanilla
Firefox I reinstall FEBE and import all my bookmarks. I really don't need to
spend the extra time to go see another website. Another trick I use is to
delete the bookmark name and only leave the favicon to showup. It saves space
and I'm only one click away from my favorite website.

If you tried other services and returned to Chrome then it seems you're
looking for a specific feature and you're not finding it, but you also didn't
tell us what it is.

Just use Chrome and try to categorize your bookmarks as best you can.

Here is a simple(and a bit ugly) website that lets you bookmark sites. I don't
use it but I recommended it before and some people seemed to like it:
<http://fav20.ro/>

------
mgrouchy
Big fan of Pinboard.in

~~~
peerst
Same here, since Pinboard is protocol compatible to Del.icio.us its well
integrated almost everywhere (also an option in lots of mobile apps).
Everywhere else I use just the great boomarklet.

Especially great is their page archiving ... goodbye link rot and you can even
download the archives of your bookmarks

------
aaronpk
I have a Wordpress install with a couple plugins: <http://aaron.pk/bookmarks/>

More info: <http://aaron.pk/bookmarks/about/>

~~~
spinchange
Very nice! I've been using Chrome and Xmarks and getting very frustrated with
sync conflicts between the two, across multiple machines. I pipe all my social
media activity out to a Wordpress installation and have been wanting to do the
same for bookmarks. Your implementation looks essentially like what I had in
mind.

I notice it only displays bookmarks for this year. Is there an out-of-the-box
way to configure this to paginate or display by year (like post archives)?

------
kmfrk
They exist somewhere in the Opera cloud ether, and locally on my computer.
Sync doesn't work, so it is a pretty crappy solution.

I thought briefly of writing some Pinboard.in extension, but I probably
wouldn't be able to extend the built-in bookmarks system anyway.

Chrome sync doesn't work either. :/

I do prefer Opera to Chrome, because it manages bookmarks better, when I need
to access them and search for something particular, though.

------
mnicole
Hijacking: I'm looking exclusively for a service that allows for images to be
applied to the link the way Snip.it was. I've found [related] visuals (even if
it's just a cropped screengrab of the site/blog post) are much quicker to
remember/navigate through later than text. Been trying to use Kippt, but it
just doesn't do it for me.

~~~
jorde
Kippt's creator here. I send you an email about this.

------
eranation
Same problem, I use chrome bookmarks mainly (due to the sync with my mobile
and every other chrome I have) and Pocket. And sometimes also Kippt.

I wonder if there is a service that syncs your Chrome bookmarks (one way, read
only) to some nice web UI that allows better searching (e.g. search by folder
name, not just bookmark title)

~~~
nzealand
1\. Export bookmarks to HTML

2\. Bookmark the resulting HTML file or upload to someplace online.

3\. Use browser find function.

~~~
eranation
Nice hack if you didn't have to repeat this each time you update you
bookmarks. Just wondering if it was done already so I don't reinvent the
wheel.

------
gala8y
I used to use Del.icio.us and _loved_ they version 2.0 look. It was beautiful
service I would happily pay for using if I had to. I was so dissapointed at
the time they were killing it, I never switched to pinboard or anything like
this.

Now I defaulted to bookmarks in Chrome, synced and encrypted + Session Buddy
extension [0].

I sort heavily using folders:

'by Topic'(abbr. to 'bT') with subfolders for current research projects (eg.
Juicer,...);

'People' with subfolders 'Friend A's name',... where I put links received from
/ sent to folks;

'Track' with 'Year.Month' subfolders;

I rearrange folders so placement of a folder is also a queue - both left-right
on the toolbar and up/down in a dropdown (Chrome does not force 'byTime' or
'A-Z' sorting and allows dragging). I also keep folder names as short as
possible: S would stand for 'Services' - web apps I use on daily basis, 'R'
would be 'Research'. Most frequently used services get bookmark without text -
just an icon on the bar.

'I defaulted to bookmarks in Chrome' means its the simplest thing, bare
minimum, but it kind of works. Saving pages on mobile? - I get lost here
(Opera Mobile on the phone has 40+ open tabs - 'bookmarked', so to speak).

Session Buddy is a beast of its own. You can name sessions there, merge them,
edit them, search them and so on.

Tools we use shape us in more subtle ways than we usually realise. I certainly
miss 'social' part of using Del.icio.us and I would definitely reach out more
if using social bookmarking service instead of bookmarks in a browser. Maybe I
should come back.

[0] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-
buddy/edac...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-
buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko)

Edit: For me 'How do you manage your bookmarks?' is a sub-problem of a topic
of 'How you take/manage notes' (including lists, todos and all that stuff). I
don't even wanna start it.

------
ToddSmithSalter
I pretty much put everything I want to keep for future reference or reading in
Pinboard.in.

------
baby
I keep a strict minimum. I use folders as much as I can. I sync them through
chrome & firefox (I have different bookmark for each browser). I use multi row
toolbar. ( <http://i.imgur.com/1UQ915E.png> )

Also, so as not to flood my toolbar I "star" some of them in Firefox. It
doesn't appear in the list but I can still give them some "tags". For example
I've tagged all the hipmunk, matrix, skyscanner, easyjet, adioso... to the
words "plane, tickets, travel" etc...

------
JoshTriplett
I use Firefox Sync to keep my bookmarks and history synced between my personal
and work laptops and my phone. I like that Sync keeps my bookmarks encrypted
on the server, and I have no interest in a web UI; I just want my browser to
have the same resources available no matter which system I use it on.

I do wish Sync supported different bookmarks toolbar folders for different
systems, though. At the moment I just only display the toolbar on one system.

------
kevinSuttle
I can't believe no one has mentioned XMarks.com I've used them for years.
Can't imagine using anything else.

I keep a minimal amount of bookmarks, only ones I visit daily.

For archiving, I use Kippt.

~~~
epsylon
I've been using XMarks for a few months now, after having tried different
options (Firefox sync, evernote, instapaper) and haven't felt the need to use
anything else as well. It can synchronize painlessly between my various
computers and has different profiles (subsets of folders) so that you can
differentiate, for example, work bookmarks from personal ones. There are
plugins for all major browsers (I'm mostly a Firefox user but sometimes use
Chrome) and a handy web interface.

It also has a nifty backup service allowing you to restore previous versions
of the bookmarks, should you have erased something important or something
else. There are also other services (password sync and open tabs sync) which I
don't use.

I use it to store ~2000 bookmarks in a loosely disorganized set of folders. My
biggest grief is that Firefox's bookmark user interface is terrible (and
Chrome's only slightly better), and it becomes painful to use when you want to
classify hundred's of bookmarks.

------
seele
I've built <http://lstack.com> to satisfy my need to store custom parameters
with bookmarks, rather than tags only (eg. <http://www.clojure.org/>
programming language, licence:epl, lisp, clojure, platform:jvm,
language:clojure, paradigm:functional). It's private and under development.
You can give it a try.

------
Cryode
Chrome. I don't bookmark a ton of stuff, just things that might be difficult
to find again in the future. Otherwise a minute on Google will usually help me
find whatever. I used to be a fan of Delicious but the browser extensions and
stuff never worked in a manner I was fond of.

Pretty sure I'll end up building my own mini-app eventually for quickly
archiving links, so I tailor it however I want.

------
rhapsodyv
I had a lot of bookmarks too. But how many times I used it? Once, twice a
year? And I never got to really organize my bookmarks. It's always bothered
me.

Now I rarely use bookmaks. I just keep a few that I visit daily.

So, everytime I need something I go to google. And I use pocket for things
that I really wanna read later. If I don't read it in some time, I just delete
the link.

It had worked fine for me. It's simple and focused.

------
fenghorn
<http://bookmarked.in> \-- It's private, does one thing and does it really
well - saves a link to a list of other links! Sometimes I just want to save a
link and continue browsing without being hassled for extraneous details like
tags or descriptions. Features=1 -> save a URL.

------
cpher
Still use delicious-- 3,600 links. I rarely need to go far back in time (and
I'm sure many links are dead), but it's a nice "journal" of what I've thought
was noteworthy over the past 7-8+ years. It would be nice to know what my very
first bookmark was, but, sadly, due to their infinite scroll interface I'm not
sure how.

------
kayge
There is probably a service that could take care of this for me, but generally
skip bookmarks altogether and just email myself the URL and a few Keywords
that are meaningful to me. Then I can just use Gmail's search to find what I'm
looking for at a later date. So it's essentially browser/OS/device/location
agnostic.

------
adieulot
Here is my method, with just Chrome and a combination of 2–3 organization
methods.

I’m tired and not english native so this is poorly written, but it enables me
to keep 434 favorites (and growing, I could scale to at least 1500 I’m sure)
and not feel overwhelmed by them.

\-----

Simple filing from zenhabits’ article: [http://zenhabits.net/how-to-create-a-
minimalist-computer-exp...](http://zenhabits.net/how-to-create-a-minimalist-
computer-experience/) I have four folders on my chrome bar, inbox – projects –
reading – archives.

\--

Inbox is for things that I must take action on, like reading it (but that
doesn’t go into Reading because I __must __read it, unlike things in Reading
that are good to read but not mandatory for me).

\--

Projects contains links related to the projects I’m currently working on, each
project got its own folder.

\--

Reading categories from Mark Hurst’s book Bit Literacy: Inside my reading
folder, I have:

Stars for blogs (and the like) from which I usually read every article/news.

Scans for blogs/etc. that I enjoy much but have to scan to then decide what
I’m reading (HN for example, the other one I have is Quora).

Targets for blogs from my competitor that I want to keep an eye on.

Tryouts for blogs that are good but not good enough that they are on my
routine for reading.

For specific articles, they go at the root of Reading.

This is poorly written and I’m sorry, you should check Bit Literacy anyway as
it has a lot of info for not feeling overflowed by bits in general (applies
whether you’re a newbie or an advanced user).

\--

Archives contains links I’ve already read. With inside a folder structure that
mimicks the categories on <http://personalmba.com/best-business-books>
(Business Creation, Value-creation/Testing, Marketing, etc…), with two
additional folders for Health and Programming.

If it doesn’t have a category, I just put them into Archives.

\--

For searching, I use the search bar from the bookmarks manager (Ctrl + Shift +
O), it searches inside the title but that’s often enough, if I know the title
doesn’t match what I’m looking after I rename the title when I’m adding the
favorite.

------
DustinCalim
I have about 1300 and Chrome's bookmark interface is slow at this quantity so
I use and recommend this extension:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neater-
bookmarks/o...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/neater-
bookmarks/ofgjggbjanlhbgaemjbkiegeebmccifi)

~~~
DustinCalim
also, it has a great search feature/filter built in

------
ataleb52
I use zootool, pretty easy and simple.

I'm going to have to try kippt that @eduadordm recommended, it looks sweet.

------
account_taken
I use Chrome for all bookmarks I want to share publicly at work, home and etc.
For private bookmarks, I use my desktop. (And this is the main reason I moved
away from Ubuntu + Unity. Someone had the bright idea of disallowing URL
dragging to the desktop.)

------
F_J_H
Evernote. Although a lot more than a bookmarking tool, once you fit it into
your workflow, it is a pretty amazing tool for curating all kinds of things,
and you can easily share it across all your devices. I couldn't live without
it now.

~~~
shoebappa
I find my Evernote has turned into a valuable asset. I used to create browser
bookmarks, but without searchable content from the page, or something visual,
no matter how much organization, it was often easier to just go back to Google
to find the link.

If it's a good tutorial, etc, I copy the relevant part of the page, and paste
into a new note. It keeps the formatting well enough, and on Desktop it picks
up the Heading and Link on it's own.

A lot of times it will be a web design, or some other smaller UI feature that
I like, and will screen clip the design and us Evernote as kind of a visual
bookmarks.

~~~
shoebappa
I figured I'd share a screenshot of why I find the visual critical and a
feature missing from all of the great sounding tools mentioned in this thread.
Historious sounds great, but so much of what I remember is what it looked
like.

<http://imgur.com/S74Ef2u>

------
eduardordm
I use kippt, it is really nice.

~~~
pahko
kippt is awesome!!! thanks for the recommendation

------
uptown
I've got a strip of favicons in the bookmark bar in Chrome for stuff I
regularly visit. For sites/pages/content I want to keep longer-term, I use
Evernote. Useful in case the site changes, or goes offline too.

------
chuhnk
I gave up on bookmarks. They just pile up and I never go back to read
anything. Search is so powerful that within a few keywords and filters I can
find exactly what I'm looking for without the need to store it.

------
mrslave
I want a plugin in syncs somewhere private and not anything akin to
del.icio.us. I've had trouble getting Xmarks with private servers working
though this may no longer be the case. Any recommendations?

------
jameszol
I use ClipBoard.com almost exclusively although I recently started to use
Evernote and it's working out well so far. Both have easy-to-use Chrome
extensions that make bookmarking and tagging a breeze.

------
icebraining
Right now I just dump them into Firefox. I'd like to keep archive copies of
the pages, but I don't want to use a third-party service for that, and I
haven't found anything to my liking.

------
geeknik
<http://zootool.com/> looks interesting, haven't used it though, still just
using Chrome for bookmarking..

------
jw_
I'll throw another recommendation in for pinboard.in.

------
webwanderings
I use tumblr's bookmarklet to grab the links. It is crazy fast to post
links/quotes/videos etc on tumblr and I don't care about the tags.

------
alisson
I've being using <http://delicious.com/> ever since, works fine for me.

------
sea6ear
I wrote a small Sinatra app that I have on my vps. No authentication
whatsoever but it hasn't been spammed yet.

------
amyunus
I post them to my tumblr site <http://links.amyunus.com/>

------
pyfap
For porn bookmarks I built <http://xstashed.com/>

------
chozero
diigo.com -- I can share bookmarks to groups so my coworkers get access to
them and best of all, with the chrome extension, every search I do on Google
also searches my diigo library.

------
bouncmpe
pinboard

~~~
dtjohnnymonkey
+1

------
dkoch
pinboard.in is my new favorite.

------
JesseAldridge
Notational Velocity + Dropbox

------
todd3834
Pocket

------
subdian
bookmarks.google.com

------
largesse
I know HN follows the "less is more" philosophy, but one thing I'd really like
is the ability to "save" a submission like you can on reddit.

As it is, the only way I can do that is to comment, which probably isn't very
good for anybody.

~~~
necrodome
Just upvote, then:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id=largesse>

~~~
largesse
Fair enough. Thanks.

------
helloamar
I use Evernote for important stuff, Readablity for articles and pocket for
interesting stuff.

