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Ask HN: How to handle bookmarks so you can find them again?
49 points by marmot777 on Feb 25, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 50 comments
This may be too pedestrian a topic for HN but I have so many bookmarks that when I had another one it disappears into the pile never to be seen again. I do use folders but now there are tons of folders, too, I've tried Trello, and I tried pocket briefly but it didn't seem quite right though maybe I didn't give it a chance.

My latest experiment is Google Bookmarks and I'm toying with just a simple either HTML page I add and categorize bookmarks on or a simple app to make managing them easier. Any suggestions on something to try?

To be perfectly honest it's possible the problem is me and not taking an organized approach, not tools that are the problem. Maybe I'm waiting for the bookmarking solution to solve a problem with clutter.




I think that organizing bookmarks is actually a pretty important problem that most people have, at least in Safari and Chrome. IIRC, Firefox on the other hand has had tagged bookmarks for sometime.

I use Pinboard with searchable descriptions and tags to create a better organizational system. There are third party clients for mobile as well.

For some bookmarks like places to visit, I've adopted a hierarchical tag system within that.


Unreal. Pinboard is cool. I put down the $11 and jumped in. I think they're smart to price weirdly yet low. I did a double take at $11 and sort of laughed. Anyway, initial impression is wow pinboard is pretty cool and definitely not trying to be fancy. I like that.


Good choice! Pinboard has been around for over 7 years, creator is on HN (idlewords), and he has posted metrics like active users, data usage, costs, and even revenue for the 7th year anniversary. Product is here to stay :).


A slightly funny thing is I emailed a friend to mention this newly organized approach but got Pinterest mixed up with pinboard and sent a link to that. I don't even know if people still use Pinterest. I remember I had an account for a little while and people pinned stuff to a wall but I didn't spend all that much time on it as that's not my thing.


Hah yeah that happens. When I've geeked out and wanted to search for people talking about Pinboard before, going past initial search results ends up being partially Pinterest stuff.


Pinboard, yes.


Shameless plug.

I have written a CLI-based bookmark manager. It's pretty simple to use, you can add links, remove them, add titles for them, descriptions etc... Everything is organized with tags so you can specify which tag you want to get links from and it will show them to you. Oh and everything's saved in a plain text file so you can backup that file, use version control and whatever you want to do with it.

I will also add searching in the future but have not come around to do it since I haven't had much time. If you or anyone wants to help it's on Github and it's written in Go. Pull requests are welcome :)

https://github.com/Endi1/drawer


Hey if you take the time to do something like this as a project more power to you and your shameless plug. :-)


This looks pretty cool. Have you considered adding support for Pinboard sync?


Thanks!

As for the Pinboard sync: not really. Since I made this mainly for myself and for personal use and since I don't use Pinboard I never thought of adding it. But it does seem interesting, maybe in the future.


Okay, now I get why I still felt there was something missing. There's actually two problems and I lumped them together. There's the bookmark problem. I want to come back to HN. And there's the "save for later" problem this looks like a cool article but there's no time now.

* So I think Pinboard does a great job at the bookmark problem but either I'm just not used to it yet or it's not quite got the "read for later" problem solved.

* It seems as though pocket might be stronger at addressing the "read for later" problem. But now that I know the missing piece is called "read for later" it's just a matter of inserting that component into my personal app ecosystem and being more alert for those solutions as pinboard seems to nail the bookmark problem.

HN and citizens thereof: you rule! Like my bookmarks, I forget all about HN but always feel it's a good experience to visit here, maybe discuss a few things, occasionally post a question or something.


Pinboard. Totally worth it.

I use Pocket for short-term "I want to come back to this soon" bookmarking, but I use Pinboard for long-term saving of stuff I might want to refer to later, thanks to tagging and its page archival feature.


And it's $11/year and they pinboard claims to respect privacy. They also say it's simple. I'm liking this but it almost sounds too good to be true but for $11 I can roll the dice. :-)


I've heard of it but I'll give it a spin. I have this dream that I'll find the right tool and it'll all fall into place.


What do you think of Pocket? I don't remember why but I tossed it after a brief test. Maybe it's time to give it another spin.


Currently, I am using Larder (https://larder.io/), which is a bookmarking tool for developers. It supports categorizing and tagging bookmarks. Categorizing is done by folders. You can make a folder that has child. It will make you easier to organize bookmarks. Beside that, you can search your bookmarked links by tag, title, and URL.

This tool also supports synchronizing your GitHub stars. So, you can track updates from projects that you starred on GitHub. If you want to bookmark something automatically, Larder extension is available for browsers, Android, and API.

I have been using Evernote. I just clip a website or PDF that I want to read later. But, I don't know why I can't use it properly. Like what you said, the problem is me. I haven't used Pinboard before. It seems many people recommend it a lot.


Evernote is cool but for some reason I have this block against using it. I'll occasionally remember I have it then quickly forget. It's weird.

This larder thing looks interesting but to avoid drowning in tools might have to bookmark it for later and hopefully will stumble on it again. Trello can also work for bookmarks if you're doing research on a defined topic I've found but for general bookmarking i tried it does not scale well so it's perfect for projects and perfect for saving some results of some searches focused on that project.


My next side project will hopefully address this problem. The issue I run into is that I have multiple data sources for articles I want to read, but no single feed that I can push those data sources into to later consume and mark as processed/read.

My current strategy has just been to accumulate hundreds-thousands of tabs in my browsers and basically rely on firefox's "save tabs from last session" feature to keep history. Downsides are that these aren't synchronized across all my browser instances. But this allows me to quickly scroll through the tab set, pick a tab, consume it, and just close it to mark as complete.

I used to dump snapshots of my working tab set into a plaintext file so that I could track history, back it up, and retrieve them later by other means, e.g. ssh into my server from phone to retrieve a link (very high overhead). This doesn't scale too well when you want to mark an item as completed as removing a line of text in a file manually in a shell session from your phone isn't exactly "fluid".

My plan is to build a service that will be a storage backend to store feeds/queues of "things I need to do", whether it's articles I've been meaning to read or just simple TODO notes like "do xyz tonight". There will be a system to label/tag items under a specific category so that in the UI you're not just bombarded with a list of thousands of TODOs.

Features I've been considering having:

* allow user to specify multiple cloud storage backends for the data to be replicated across * have relatively simple storage format, motivation being that I should be able to view/modify data through plaintext interface like editing a file with vim if I want to * create firefox plugin that will use this same system to synchronize tabs, this would mean that as a side effect I would have this information available on all my systems and backed up as well * web UI to access all generic queues, e.g. items I've manually created as well as the queues storing my tabs

Sometimes I wonder if there's a term associated with how obsessive I am about not losing information...


I do pretty much the same thing as you for "working tabs" but I bookmark each tab set as something like "[WIP] coffee shops to visit in manhattan" so Chrome doesn't get bogged down with 100+ tabs and multiple "sessions".

I also wrote some AppleScript code to move open tab sessions back and forth between Safari and Chrome [1]. You also might be interested in some of the alternatives listed in the readme, like OneTab.

[1]: https://github.com/tedmiston/tab-transporter


I'm thrilled that I'm not the only one drowning in knowledge who wants access to it. :-)


I wanted to come back to this thread to say I imported my bookmarks into https://pinboard.in/ and my bookmarks feel useable again, though I deleted a bunch once I could see how much crap I had in there.

I also fired up Feedly account as that's helpful too and I'd sort of forgotten about my account.

I'm thinking of testing out some more things as it seems like maybe there should be one more piece of the puzzle. Maybe that'll be pocket though I don't even remember what the interface is like or why I don't use it. Maybe no good reason at all.


Circa 2000. A commercial product named PowerMarks. Cross-browser. One click bookmarking. Default indexing based on words pulled from title, some meta tags, whatever -- that the user could augment/change on the fly. Terms listed space-separated, making doing so very easy and quick.

Rapid, incremental pattern-matching search against the index. A list of matches would shrink as you continued to type in your search term. Again, space-separated, making this very quick to type.

Basically, if you remembered a few relevant things/terms about the page, you were probably going to find it within a couple of seconds. With the automated, default pretty-good indexing, you didn't have to spend time manually entering tags/terms. You didn't have to think and then manually sort bookmarks into folders.

PowerMarks "just worked".

Unfortunately, it was shareware, and it eventually went the way of a lot of such products. Add to this the continued changes of browsers that made keeping the cross-browser functionality and the application's independence (of itself, a major plus, in my book) an increasing struggle.

Sigh. I still miss it.


I wrote delicious for this originally. Now I use Pinboard for "ambient" bookmarks and Trello for project-oriented bookmarks.


hey - can you explain a bit on how you use trello for project-oriented bookmarks? or is it just links in a tile?


Nice! I used del.icio.us for years. Thanks!


I just use Evernote. Search is not great, but with the combination of notebooks and tags, you can keep things organized fairly well.

And, with the browser plugin, any google search also returns results from Evernote, which is good because if I thought it worthwhile to clip the page in the past, it was probably a good one.


I use quiver for both notes and bookmarks (https://github.com/HappenApps/Quiver), with the data residing on Google drive. My reasons (YMMV):

1. The data format is clean and open. At some point if the app becomes unavailable for whatever reason, I can write my own to retrieve my data. Or someone will.

2. There's an unofficial app for Android called "quaver". It's not very polished, but when linked with a folder synced to Google drive, it allows me to access/edit my notes on mobile.

3. Search is pretty good. You can tag stuff, arrange by folders, and search.

4. It can store attachments.

5. Sometimes if I think I need an offline version of a page, I just do a copy-paste and save it in quiver. Or sometimes I just save the page as PDF and add it to quiver.


>3. Search is pretty good. You can tag stuff, arrange by folders, and search.

Astonishingly, there's no search and replace. Like.. at all.

Incredibly frustrating because it's such an incredible app otherwise.


I'd like to say thanks to those who replied. I frankly didn't think anyone would upvote this, thinking it was too trivial. Thank you for the upvotes and thank you for the suggestions. Maybe one of these solutions will do the trick or maybe more than one is the best way.


So, I've actually been working on a bookmarks manager for myself (screenshot)[1].

I have this exact same problem.. so many links and no good way to organize them. My previous solution was a simple markdown file that I would add my links to and then generate an html page served through my website. But this got really cumbersome. I wanted something easier to manage/edit, so I made this.

Is anyone interested in trying this out? If so, check out my profile contact info and I'd be happy to discuss it :) I'm very close to having the mvp complete, and it would be nice to get some feedback before opening it up to the public more.

[1]: http://i.imgur.com/LKSQuT4.png


You might enjoy this project I put together:

https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/

Demo:

http://skx.github.io/bookmarks.public/

New bookmarks are just appended to a data-file, and jQuery/javascript magic makes it easy to discover things. I store my own bookmarks in a git-repository so I can clone to ~/Repos/personal/bookmarks/ on each of my systems.


Yes, I saw this a few months ago on HN! Actually, it's got a lot of great features, but lacking the layout I'm personally looking for. The 3 col layout (in my screenshot), along with visible favicons, allows me to quickly glance and find what I'm looking for without having to scroll to far. I also plan on adding a quick filter search too.

Great job on your app though, it's very functional and much better than other bookmarking solutions I've seen.


What do you want to do with your bookmarks?

I think using Pocket (mentioned in comments, not by you) solves a different problem than browser bookmarks, for example. Describing your desires may help the community describe (or build!) options.


Okay enough people have mentioned pocket and I tested and dropped it that I think I'll make pocket my final test of the evening. I'd say I feel a sense of accomplishment that I organized insanely cluttered bookmarks on a Saturday night, despite how pathetic that might sound when I say it out loud. :-)


Create a FlipBoard account, create as many private magazines (categories) as you want, install the bookmarklet and flip/bookmark away.


I have Flipboard but I have not tried using it in this way. I'll give that a spin, too. I didn't even realize it had a private magazine feature.


How about https://meemo.minimal-space.de/ ?


I have found myself using TiddlyWiki for this. I have pages on topics in which I put links and notes. It supports tags also.


I use a wiki too, I have a bookmark that makes an entry on the page I enter along with a comment.


A nextcloud solution would be awesome to me. Would need a browser plugin to simplify the page and upload it to nextcloud, then nextcloud could work out what tags would be appropriate for it, and you could add some more if needed.


I put links on notes in Google Keep grouped in some fashion. Some overlap, but that's okay. I think I saw someone post on HN that they used Keep for that which prompted me to do it.


I use Google Bookmarks with tags, but even then I can lose stuff. I had thought to record them as prolog facts with url and a list of tags and date. then build out some synonyms for the tags.


A manually edited file with a JSON-like syntax for different tags and items listed under each. Regularly left open with several other text files used for personal organization.


http://moovlink.com - you can organise links into cathegories, rearrange them, tag them, search for links ...


Socialize your bookmarks? Is that a thing? I'm trying to imagine my friends adding bookmarks for me. It'd be interesting if nothing else.


What sort of bookmark numbers are you looking at?

I currently have about 2000 articles on Pocket, and just tagging + simple search works for me.


I use pocket and surprised to see no one mentioned it. Is it nt that good? Now curious to know.


I have an HTML file along with my dot-files that I keep synchronized in git.


I use pocket. It even adds a "save to pocket" button to hacker news!


It's crazy to think that hackers/developers/etc are using all these cloud-based things with slow interfaces and controlled schemes by third parties. I'm not even a true geek and I find this behavior a bit bewildering. Where are the heroes?

Export your bookmarks to HTML, modify your HTML page to be as many sub-pages as you want, add descriptions under each, and you're done. Put your main page with your chief faves as your only "saved" bookmark on your browser.

No clouds. No one can erase your data. No one can charge you for your own bookmarks (the absolute height of insanity).

Modify as you see fit in your fave code editor.

Oh my... you must use Cmd-D because you are in a rush? Trust me. If you're that in a rush, you aren't even cataloging or archiving the source correctly. And honestly, probably 90% of bookmarks aren't worth saving anyway. You do know about search engines, right?

I also like to add notes as to Why I Saved This: because if I can't really drum up a good reason, it isn't worth it. Things that do NOT count for that field are "for later", "because", "it's cool", "maybe so-and-so might need it" (what are we doing? saving for other people too?).

You can use tags if you want in your descriptions by putting a hashtag in front of the word, but why bother? You can Ctrl/Cmd-F your whole bookmark page and fly through your options far faster than other methods. All text is searchable, right? Must we insist on the insanity of prefixing certain words with #?

Look ma! You can even change your fonts and get all hackathonish with CSS, if you get bored.

Need to send a collection of bookmarks to someone else? (Warning above about this, but still....)... Just cut and paste part of your webpage into your email, etc. Look at that. Your descriptions are already there, guaranteeing that they will be more likely to look at your links, or causing you to be noted as an intrusive link-pusher, but either way, goal accomplished!

Now, some HN readers will insist on mobile-sync. That's where they are wrong and you'll be right to ignore them. Anything worth reading or noting is on the real web, not the mobile web, and standing around with your phone collecting and sending links is about as inhumane of a task as you can do. It was bad on your laptop; it's downright madness on your phone. Do yourself a favor and skip it.

If you must save some links for mobile use only (I don't know... the website of your local library so you can look up its hours? Oh wait... Google/Apple maps instead), then just save them ONLY there for quick access. You don't need to sync. Repeat after me. Sync is a lie from the devil to give clouds the power. Stop doing it so much. Also, stop printing stuff (another lecture for another time).




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