

Ask HN: Do you bookmark or collect content? - AshMokhberi

I&#x27;m working on an app that&#x27;s essentially a tool for bookmarking content. We only have a small user base and to take the app where I wanted to go I need to do a lot of work re-writing it. Before I invest more time I wanted to get some ideas of how many people use bookmarks in any form and how.<p>So what apps&#x2F;tools&#x2F;process do you use for bookmarking content and what would you improve ?<p>If you don&#x27;t bookmark why not ? Is it a lack of good tools or you just don&#x27;t have any desire to ?
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a3n
Here's one thing I hate about bookmarks. They aren't. Bookmarks. They don't
keep your place in the middle of a long work. They only, and always, point to
the beginning of a work, not inside it, unless the author has made internal
anchors and exposes them.

I'd like bookmarks to be bookmarks.

I'd also like bookmarks to keep track of what they have pointed to. So a
bookmark might show you that it has pointed to paragraphs 10, 22, 39, and the
current 44. Cause it'd be nice to be able to go back to paragraph 22 as a
reference.

And a bookmark should have notes. Firefox bookmarks have properties/notes
accessible on right-click; I imagine clever people could expand that.

Heck, why not make them queryable by sql?

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kaoD
Yes, I do, in my browser bookmarks... but I never come back. I just hoard
bookmarks and then sweep and prune whole folders from time to time.

The amount of information I'm interested in is such that the time needed to
understand it is >>>> my lifetime.

Unfortunately a tool won't help.

~~~
AshMokhberi
That's a very interesting perspective are you mainly using bookmarks for very
important content? Do you ever just want somewhere to put stuff temporarily as
you're browsing?

~~~
kaoD
Okay, here's my workflow:

When I'm interested in something (e.g. cryptography) I open a bunch of tabs
with usual suspects (google for cryptography, crypto stack exchange, google
for crypto books...) and crawl these for even more tabs. Once I get a broad
base of subjects to learn from, I slowly read these tabs and perhaps open more
from these.

More often than not, I run out of time, so I have to temporarily store these
tabs. I use my browser bookmarks for this.

My real bookmarks (real as in "the way bookmarks are intended to be used") are
just in the bookmarks toolbar instead of hidden in bookmark folders.

I don't store important stuff in bookmarks. Bookmarks are not important.
Important stuff is left as an open tabs to be reviewed ASAP.

~~~
AshMokhberi
That's interesting. It's very much what I assumed we use tabs to store the
temporary stuff that we need right now or in the very short term. Bookmarks
are not a solution engineered towards this very temporary way of working.
However tabs are not the ideal solution either they are just a work around. I
often find I want a convenient and temporary place to put this short lived
content and it should disappear when I stop using it. What do you think ?

------
a3n
I have finally found a workflow that works for me, and I'm slowly converting
my thousands of unusable bookmarks (I'm a hoarder).

I use pinboard (delicio.us clone) and firefox.

pinboard lets you tag a bookmark, and you can subscribe to a tag's rss feed,
or a combination of tags' feed. It's pretty clever.

firefox has a "live bookmark" feature, where a bookmark is really an rss
reader of a specific feed. Peanut butter in my chocolate.

So for news sites, I tag them in pinboard as 'news'. For news sites that I
want to read daily, they get an additional 'daily' tag. For news sites that I
read frequently but not daily, they get the addtional 'often' tag. That's all
in pinboard. I use a firefox extension to save pinboard bookmarks.

In firefox I have a bookmarks folder called news. Inside the news bookmark
folder I have three live bookmarks, each pointing to one of my pinboard rss
feeds:

    
    
      news #firefox folder
        news # firefox live bookmark pointing to pinboard 'news' rss feed
        news daily # pinboard feed for combo of 'news' and 'daily' tags
        news often # combo of 'news' and 'often' tags
    

In firefox I click on Bookmarks/news/news often, and I see the list of all
pinboard bookmarks that have been tagged with both 'news' and 'often'.

And since it's pinboard I can access them from anywhere, any browser, no
synchronization required.

Now I actually use my bookmarks.

~~~
a3n
And, to manage lots of open tabs strictly in firefox, use tab groups:
[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-
tab...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-
tabs?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=what-are-tab-groups)

Basically you can divide your open tabs into groups, and then only have one
group open at a time. You can easily switch between groups. That way I can
switch focus between different subjects that I'm studying.

Unfortunately pinboard can't see firefox tab groups, it only sees all the tabs
in all the groups. It would be nice to use pinboard to "save all tabs" for
just the currently opened firefox tab group. Maybe some day.

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doubt_me
I have over 2000 bookmarks. Simply organized by folder on my chrome browser.

There are a few solid good bookmarking apps but they all for the most part
lack the option to import bookmarks/ also don't really have clean usable UX.
The ones I am talking about are mostly for making bookmarks a social thing
like pinterest

some of them are part of my Freeware Index project

[https://github.com/Doubtme/FreeWare_Index](https://github.com/Doubtme/FreeWare_Index)

The rest are for my website index which has 17 main categories and 40+ sub
categories spread out. I haven't made the website index public yet but I
intend to once I organize it. I will probably end up deleting a few hundred
links once I get to it

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mcintyre1994
I don't bookmark in browser because I use lots of devices and don't want to be
tied to one browser. If I find something I want to read, on whatever device, I
send it to Pocket. If I want to keep it longterm, I star it and IFTTT sends it
to an Evernote notebook for me. It works great for me, and if you want to know
the one feature that would stop me ever swapping Pocket for your service, it'd
be if you lacked IFTTT integration.

So really, I see the read-it-later service as the logical, device-agnostic
development of bookmarks. That's not to say they can't be improved, but I
don't have a suggestion offhand that hasn't been posted yet.

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frou_dh
In recent years, I have preferred "read it later" services to traditional
bookmarks. I delete items once I've read them (rather than building up an
archive), and have went from Instapaper to Pocket to Apple's Reading List,
each of which was an upgrade in UX.

That leaves traditional bookmarks mainly for select "reference" resources like
API documentation.

For whatever reason, I have a strong dislike of "junk drawers", even when they
are digital, and like getting rid of things.

~~~
AshMokhberi
So do you think that's what's more important it's not that bookmarks are wrong
it's that the UX is terrible ? Or is that reading stuff later is actually what
you want to do most of the time with bookmarks ?

~~~
frou_dh
I think I'm just a neurotic "anti-hoarder" and it extends in to the digital
realm. A lot of stuff gets deleted instead of archived in Gmail, too.

It's probably not worth taking much notice of this particular mindset.

~~~
AshMokhberi
I think the opposite you're exactly the person worth paying attention to :)

I think most people like the idea of being "free" from hoarding. because it
clutters the mind. I guess the thing with bookmarks is that they need to
disappear after either an action or a certain amount of time has passed since
they where last used/created.

I'm also wondering how this works visually. I often find if things are just
messy then I hate it and feel like I'm cluttered. But if something is kept
clean and structured then I'm happy for it to stay as long as it gets out of
my way when I don't need it.

I'm wondering if bookmarks are the same. If I don't need you disappear. But
when I want to get it back then I want to find it in a clean and organised
way.

The problem is I don't want to invest anytime in the process of managing the
clutter. I want to manage itself.

What do you think ?

~~~
frou_dh
Yes, that sounds reasonable.

Another commenter mentions going on a bookmarking spree when investigating a
specific topic. Helping classify and process the results of those sprees seems
like it would be helpful.

IMO a lot of other uses of traditional bookmarks range from pointless (I can
instead easily type/auto-complete my favourite domains) to better served by
specialist apps (news aggregator sites + caching read it later apps being a
great example).

------
scousetech
Yes got loads of bookmarks, use Chrome because of the sync facility. Can
add/remove bookmarks & they're synced between mobile devices & laptops.

~~~
AshMokhberi
Thanks for your response, I agree sync is an awesome feature. Is there
anything you would like to improve about the process of bookmarking ?

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stevekemp
I store my bookmarks under revision control, as a single HTML file. The file
has some jQuery magic to allow tagging and filtering, and there's an online
demo linked to from the repository:

[https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/](https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/)

(I have my own bookmarks in a private repository. Which allows me to sync to
N-machines.)

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RubberSoul
I've always thought it would be nice to have bookmarks that either self
destruct or pop-up as a reminder some specified time in the future. For
example, I just read an article about creating a bootable USB copy of OS X
Mavericks. I bookmarked it as a reminder for when Mavericks comes out. That's
a bookmark I'm going to need exactly once in the future and that should be
destroyed as soon as I act on it.

~~~
AshMokhberi
That's a very interesting use case and I can see how that would be valuable. I
share a similar thought on bookmarks as in right now they are very permanent
things when what I really want is like a temporary scrapboard that
automatically disappears when I stop adding stuff to it. What do you think
would that be useful ?

------
_random_
Chrome: well-known provider and is available without third-party
installations. The latter will either fail or be acquired and shut down
anyway.

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radisb
I use Chrome and pin the tabs I definitely dont want to lose but I cant read
right now. They stay there forever and dont take space. If they start piling
up and do take space, I am forced to take out some and keep the really useful
ones. Those that survive this iterative process for a long time go into the
bookmarks.

------
clockwork_189
Yes I do. I use Kippt. They even have a google chrome extension.

~~~
AshMokhberi
That's exactly the direction we where going would you mind looking at our
extension. You don't have to use it just maybe read and watch the demo vid. I
would love to get your thoughts on it.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/latis/adkmonocjplf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/latis/adkmonocjplflicopchfcgmknddbnpbe)

