Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?
279 points by kayf on Jan 21, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 268 comments
Every time I saw something cool on the internet, I add it to my bookmarks. Result: I have more than 5000 bookmarks on firefox. I tried to add keywords and descriptions, but it takes me too much time to do that every time.

I also tried to use notion.so (an amazing tool !) to manage my bookmarks, but the plugin "Notion Web Clipper" does not allow to add tags when you save a link.

And you, how do you deal with your bookmarks? Any good tips to keep interesting resources close to you?




At what point do bookmarks essentially become an internet of your own making? I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection, or maybe a Yahoo style directory to browse them.

Or...

Stop collecting the internet and give your brain a break from data overload. There is a certain flavour of FOMO that keeps tabs open forever and bookmark lists getting huge. Let go of it all. There will always be more data to consume every day, you'll never have time for that AND 5k of bookmarks. Use Google when you want to go back to something. I bet if you deleted 90% of those bookmarks you would not really miss them after a month.


Except with google it’s becoming impossible to find links from several years ago. Unless I remember exactly the right keywords and maybe the website name...

How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is virtually unlimited, and we can only collect so many bookmarks anyway. Searching through bookmarks isn’t a difficult task, and it’s way better than relying on google.


> The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”

I think for me there is so much information coming at me every day, that I rarely have time to go back to something later. I bookmark a select number of sites for projects/interests I am working on but I couldn't deal with having ~5k worth of bookmarks in my backlog. I just don't have time for managing/triaging/reviewing that.

My comment about FOMO addresses the fear of 'what if I can't find this stuff again'. It's more akin to a hoarding mentality, I suppose. How many people's garages are full of junk they 'think they might come back to later'. It's something I actively eschew because if I allow that thought process to enter into my life I'll be hindered by the activity, and the ability to let go is important to my happiness and wellbeing. I literally can't sleep at night if I think that I might missed out on archiving something I might need. I find it enlightening to treat the world as ephemeral.

I freely admit different people work/think/live in different ways and perhaps my original comment was a little flippant.


Google (and related services, such as youtube) allows you to use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to only show results that were created before or after a certain date.


I think you're missing the wood for the trees a bit there. The point is that there's so much on Google now - and a lot of it is effectively just crap data like pinterest posts - that it becomes increasingly impossible to find specific needles in that haystack. If I know at some point in the last 10 years I've read an article online that could have been written any point in the last 30 years, before and after dates don't really help.


Pintrest seems to inappropriately float to the top of way to many searches.


You're suggesting spending a lot of time and hassle trying to wrestle with search engines instead of just keeping a bookmark that can be found and accessed very quickly?


2600 has an essay, "The Mysteries of the Hidden Internet", on this phenomenon in their autumn 2019 quarterly. It was quite a fun read! Check it out at Barnes and Noble. Or buy a copy (https://store.2600.com/products/autumn-2019).


Using Google to go back to something is only viable if the site stays online and Google doesn't change their algorithm in a way that makes what I'm looking for more difficult to find.

Time and experience have shown me that sites are ephemeral and Google is constantly changing things, so that's why I archive the things that I find most useful.


Bookmarks don't really solve the website/page is no longer on line problem. But they do solve the Google moved the cheese problem.


Right. Which is why I archive, not bookmark.


Surfing the web is a journey. In the same sense that we store our photos on the cloud and don't want to lose them because they remind us of experiences. The web is no different, we keep exploring and take some souvenirs along the way. Why does everything have to be useful and optimal always? I wouldn't want to rely on Google to keep some nice memories and recall stuff I found useful.


beautifully put, my bookmarks tell a story


The compromise version of this: use Pinboard. Make liberal use of the "read later" function and close the tab. Never open the "read later" list on Pinboard. You've now dealt with your desire to save it for the future in the least inconvenient way.

(Slightly more seriously, if you get Pinboard archiving you can actually search the saved text of the bookmarks)


Or, a book mark means I have vetted this page and know it to be of good high quality content. So in this context a bookmark search would be a good feature. Better layout and categorization would help as well. The services that tried and failed to provide this just redid browser bookmarks and added social. I think they missed out on why people have 100 tabs open.


For example, my ordinary PDF document creation needs are covered by trivially exporting them from LibreOffice.

Should I need actual PDF editing, I'd open all of the bookmarks I filed under "utilities/PDF" over the years to find something useful: a lean compromise between proactively installing unneeded software and ignoring interesting things I stumble upon.

I'd expect to do a web search for promising software that might have been moved since I bookmarked it, which would be obviously a smaller and easier task than a more open-ended search.


What I would find better as well is if a websearch could use this bookmarking as an additional flag to rank search results in a personal/social context. I imagine this was an ideal behind google+ plus marker thing.


> Use Google when you want to go back to something.

Yeah, good luck with that. Most of the things I bookmark are things that were really hard to find in the first place. Google isn't much help with stuff like that.


I feel like you might be missing out on the fact that people use bookmarks in different ways. I don't download most apps on my phone, so I use everything through firefox web browser on my android phone and I dont like having a million tabs open on my phone. So I use bookmarks to quickly get me to my bank or youtube or paypal, etc etc etc. Bookmarks arent just a tool for people to stash random things they'll never come back to. Sometimes people actually use bookmarks regularly for just day to day browsing.


> “I guess you need to create a search engine...”

For years [1] I’ve been looking for a browser extension that will let me flip a switch and search only within the sites in my history and/or bookmarks.

You know you’ve visited some sites with the answer you want, but have to try to recreate the divine moment in google.

[1]: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/46270/solut...


> I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection

I did: https://historio.us


Be advised: your username-based subdomain is not browsable in modern security-conscious browsers as your LE cert for the main domain is not a wildcard cert and isn't valid for the username.historio.us subdomains.


It is a wildcard cert, it just expired because for some reason acme.sh stopped liking the CloudFlare API. I'm trying to fix it as we speak, but the rate-limiting isn't helping.

EDIT: It's back up, now I have to figure out why acme can't automatically renew... Very odd.


Ahh, sorry for the erroneous report, then. TIL: MobileSafari's certificate display doesn't show the subject alternative names.


It's no problem, thanks!


Your demo page throws a security error on Firefox FYI.


It's fixed, thanks. The cert failed to automatically renew and expired at a very inconvenient time.


If I bookmark and keyword it the first time I spend 15 minutes searching for it, I can save 15 minutes next time I need it.


The type of serendipity you get from Google versus Bookmarks is not the same. Do you really want a singular company and search engine to determine how you surf the web? That was partially facetious but I do think bookmarking and googling are two different types of search.


Your argument seems to be "I don't find something useful, so nobody else should use it"

The whole point of bookmarks for me is to offload brain load. Rather than memorize little facts that are 99% useless, I can use an insignificant amount of storage to save a massive amount of information in case I ever need it. It's nice you don't have a need for them, but for those of us who do, "let go if it all" isn't helpful


There are 3 types of bookmarks:

1) Read-later

Something interesting you want to read. Items in this category should be automatically removed after a certain period of time, so it doesn't get out of hand. New RSS feed items would also fit into this category.

2) Save-for-later

Something you're sure will be useful down the road. This should be retrieved first and foremost using a powerful full-text search engine. Minimal tagging can also be very helpful. Lastly, it's critical these items are archived by the bookmark manager so you always have the content even if the website shuts down.

3) Todo

Something you need to take action on. For example, buy this product, try this new open-source library, install an app, etc. These should have optional reminders to alert you at a certain day or time.

Currently my system is a terrible mess: I email myself for read-later and todo but put save-for-later in Pocket. This is very frustrating because there's tons of bookmark manager options but none support all 3 types, most have terrible search, are slow, and don't have full-text search or archival.

So last year I started building what's going to be the Superhuman of Bookmark Managers:

https://AcornBookmarks.com

It will be 100% open-source and available as a hosted service.

I'm focusing on the fundamentals: speed, performance, robustness. I'm using PouchDB, so all your data is 100% offline which makes it very, very fast. Of course, it'll support all 3 bookmark types, have full-text search and archival. It'll run on all browsers and platforms, including mobile apps built in react-native. It's UI is going to be fun, geeky, and beautiful sci-fi with multiple light/dark color themes.

If this sounds interesting, sign-up on the site — I'd love to chat with you about this.


I like your strategy. I have a "For Review" folder in my toolbar. Things get read and Saved or Removed from there. I export my bookmarks every few days also. And I have a link on my toolbar to the bookmarks.html I save to.

I also favorite YC items.


I feel like you understand my digital hoarding better than most. Would love to contribute in any way I can to this project (financial or my own sweat). Let me know if you are looking for help.


Yes, let’s talk! Assuming you dropped your email on my website, just reply to the automated signup email and we can take it from there.


Would love to know when it's opensource (so we can get it packaged for Cloudron). Signed up for early access.


I gave up hope on bookmarks. This idea shines some hope! I miss delicious, that used to be so good.


Try out https://yabs.io (it is like delicious) I created it :-)


Bookmarked


If you're willing to tag things so you can find them later, then https://pinboard.in

If you're not then don't store them, just google them when you need them. That will either help you find the link you wanted, or it will find you something better, because the world has moved on since then.


I second the Pinboard suggestion. By paying the relatively inexpensive yearly fee, you get full text archives too which is great in the fight against link rot.


I second this seconding and comment about the archive.

the whole point of bookmarks is to be able to retrieve the info later. that archive has helped me SO many times.


Wholeheartedly agree with this. I've been very happy with pinboard, the one area that could use improvement is on the mobile side: it's a bit annoying to set a new bookmark in a mobile browser.


Pinner works fine on iOS.


Simplepin on iOS.


On Android I use Pindroid.


You don't necessarily have to tag them, if you pay a bit extra for full-text archive, then import your browser's bookmarks.


Are there any services where you can submit a URL and get a list of tags back curated by humans?

EDIT: Looks like Pinboard does this already! Mea culpa.


When you try to bookmark a page, it shows recommended tags based on the other users' tags. So I can safely answer yes.


https://pinboard.in/t:whatever


Pinboard.in + Shiori on mac for easy access and saving bookmarks in an Alfred-like way.


Shiori regularly is broken for me these days. Not filling any fields. I’ve almost given up on it. I thought it was because it wasn’t updated. Not that it might just be me.


How does Pinboard compare with Pocket? Pocket appears to be integrated into Firefox.


you use a boomarklet (or plugin) to bookmark things. you use a link / bookmark to retrieve them. That link to your bookmarks can be on your home screen like pocket things. It's not radically different in terms of function. It is a bookmark manager after all.

it doesn't suggest links to you and the visual style is very different.

It's run by a single developer who responds quickly to feedback.

IMNSHO it's worth every penny.


My problem with bookmarks isn't managing them, but remembering that they exist. It always seems faster to type words into google than to try to remember whatever taxonomy or tagging scheme. And I never go back to check for "something cool on the internet" at all.

I made an app that shows me N of my previous bookmarks per day at random, loosely following spaced repetition. Seeing the same articles/conversations/tutorials multiple times helps me to recall them when needed, and I sometimes have serendipitous ideas.

I've been doing this for years and it's amazing how much of the internet is broken. Maybe 20% of my bookmarks don't load and require the wayback machine. hacker news comment pages always work though :)


Same here. Bookmarks basically became obsolete once search got good enough.


But after search got good, it got bad. Or at least increasingly strained by the sheer magnitude of shit now online.


It's still better than the early 2000's, which is the last time I really needed "bookmarks."


My experience with this is very, very different. I think Google search has generally become much worse than then, although other search engines seem to be at about early 2000's quality level.


Even with the trend of personalized search, bookmarking still has a place because it keeps the act of sharing web content social. Right now, there isn’t a way to search through the web pages curated and recommended by a friend or an expert.

Edit: Reddit is a possible example of the above, but what I meant is an automatic curation of search to niche ness or specificity of people.


Tell us more about your app? What OS/browsers does it work for?


it's entirely for personal use. this iteration is an android app with a ui similar to twitter.

I manually save urls to a file in broad categories and occasionally import them into a database. It parses titles tags, favicons and some content. Some times I do different ml things with page content (lsi models, summaries, etc), but not recently.

Literally anyone here could make this in an afternoon


Well...I'm working on my own thing (FOSS)

https://github.com/calpaterson/quarchive

It's quite early but I'm able to use it as a near replacement for pinboard (including search but not including tags). I have circa 6k bookmarks so I feel your pain.

It's based on sync of your browser bookmarks via an extension. This works well because it allows you to bookmark on your phone.

Here are some features I have planned:

1. Show what pages link to a bookmark

2. Show discussions (HN/Reddit/Lobsters) about a bookmark

3. Full text search (including of PDFs), perhaps including the above discussions

4. The ability to additionally just record everything you browse (including full text)

Right now it works for me but looks a bit basic - I plan to soup up the graphic design once I have the MVP working:

https://i.imgur.com/5VdgGU7.png

I'm hoping to make it available as a hosted service at some point

If you're interested in this topic, have feature ideas or are even interested in working on it with me either comment here or please send me email - cal@calpaterson.com . I know social bookmarking is not trendy any more but I still use it a lot and pinboard is a bit limited.


I made my own bookmark manager in Django and it's served my needs for years. Your mileage may vary of course. https://github.com/gjost/django-linkpile


why "not including tags"

i derive _so_ much value from having well tagged items in Pinboard.


Tags are planned - they just aren't something I personally use much (I prefer searching) so when trying to stand up a version for my personal use I skipped tags. :)


In Firefox, I do these things:

1: When I bookmark something, I make sure I add 3+ short tags. "emacs" "orgmode" "LaTeX". Or "devops" "helm" "plugin".

2: I use a Firefox extension to set a default folder for new bookmarks. It's called "Default Bookmark Folder"

3: I use the SingleFile Firefox extension set to save a copy of every page I bookmark to my Google Drive. This enables me to keep a snapshot of the page so I can refer back to it whenever I want. I use this as the directory structure: "Saved\Web\$YEAR\$MONTH\$ISODATE\$PAGETITLE.html" - example "Saved\Web\2020\01\2020-01-21\Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks.html"

Firefox's history and bookmark search are great. Its "library" window is very useful (ctrl-j or command-j)

EDIT:

I organize my firefox bookmarks toolbar on the same "bar" as the urlbar. So it goes something like this: bookmarks(gmail, music, work folder, personal folder). Back/Forward/Reload/Home. Urlbar. Extensions Icons.

EDIT2: Big shoutout to the SingleFile Firefox extension. The author, https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=gildas is a really great person who implemented my suggestion to add the feature to SingleFile to save pages when bookmarked. They deserve all the praise and more people should use this excellent extension (which is available for Chrome, too)


Check out my https://histre.com/

The main reason behind my building Histre is the idea that we throw away a lot of the signal we generate while doing things online and this can be put to good use for ourselves.

Bookmark management is just a special case of knowledge management. What you really need is a knowledge management tool that is easy to use. You'll get a ton of other benefits too.

As it is right now, Histre aids the casual online research we all do (ie the explore -> filter -> decide loop). For example, it removes friction in taking notes on links you're looking at, with free-form tags that you don't have to create first and other such niceties that add up. And it easy to group notes into notebooks and share. In short, when you have to look at a bunch of links for something (decide on AirBnB, people to hire, material for your next blog post, etc) Histre makes your life easier. But this is just the starting point for what Histre intends to do.

IMHO the biggest problem with apps like Evernote, Notion etc is that it becomes digital hoarding, and not a knowledge base. And the knowledge base focused apps out there involve a lot of manual upkeep, which almost never happens, especially at work. Things start out okay and quickly fall into disrepair. I'm differentiating from the other note taking apps by automatically putting together a knowledge base (grouped by topic etc).

One idea I'm excited about and I'm working on right now is: Histre automatically fetches updates from the websites you visit, ranks the websites with things like lack of ads / referral links and ranks the new posts with your 'revealed preferences' of what you tend to actually read from the list of updates previously shown etc. Personally I'm hoping for this to be a replacement for social news sites, which are too sensitive to people who bother to go upvote on /new.

Automatic Upkeep: Histre detects links/notes related to your existing notebooks and offers to update those notebooks with the new links and notes. This is similar to how Google Photos suggests new photos for your existing albums. This solves the upkeep problem. Currently people create knowledge bases with good intentions and it becomes stale and useless quite fast. This is a work in progress.

If there is anything else you want Histre to do, I'd love to hear it: hn@histre.com


Can content from Histre be exported and easily digestible into a home brew solution or is the user dependent on maintaining* an account with Histre in order to not lose what they've put into it?


Yeah, that's a big deal for me too. I want more info on what "Your Data is Your Data" really means. If I can't walk away with it, it's not really mine.


I agree. You'll be able to export everything. org-mode first (as I'm an emacs user myself). csv next.


The only thing I saw was that they dont share it and I can have it deleted at any time


Thanks for checking it out MiracleUser. Yes, I'm working on org-mode export right now. I'll add csv soon. You will be able to get all the data out at anytime.


Nice, thank you for the info. I'll check this out


> but it takes me too much time to do that every time

Good. It means you will stop hoarding bookmarks that you don't need.

An inherent problem with digital content is that it's pretty easy and cheap to produce (with corresponding quality), and almost free to copy―but still expensive in effort to consume and take meaningful action. You need to move the balance if you want to avoid piling up digital garbage that you won't ever conscientiously touch.

If you don't have time now to not even read the articles, but to just add tags, you won't have it later either unless you take a sabbatical or retirement to go through that mess. Filing the pages in an organized system needs a quite good amount of work in exchange for a chance that you at least can find them in the future if the need arises. As a minimum, it requires that you have some understanding of what the page is about.


Digital content being so easy to produce and often of such poor quality is the best reason to use bookmarks. Trying to get back to the same tutorial I liked is impossible when searching “react firebase authentication” shows a hundred new poor quality articles being written every day. If I see a couple that might be promising I’ll throw them into my bookmarks to go through later. Because most of them might be trash but who knows if I’ll ever be able to find them again to verify.


Yes, in the past the web was able to self curate. People were creating links to stuff they found valuable. Google amplified these signals. These days it is too easy to copy-paste stuff and creating meaningless content is valued over referencing reference material. Google search quality went down.

What we need is a way to get Google and other search engines to index our bookmarks to figure out what people value.


Ugh, the worst is when I click a StackOverflow result that doesn't solve my problem so I go further down the list and all the rest of the results are sites that just index and mirror SO content.


> I have more than 5000 bookmarks on firefox

With the risk of sounding like someone on StackOverflow, do you even need to do this?

I have <100 bookmarks at any time and regular bookmark directories with browser sync work great. I don't have a good solution for efficiently managing thousands. But I also can't imagine that you'll ever actually read all of them, or need to re-read most of them. It's okay to see something on the internet and not save it.


This!

Some long time ago i started adopting the habit of keeping my tab-count low to get more focus on things i need in this exact moment. I only work session-based and like to start things of clean every day. This then resulted in (obviously) lots and lots more bookmarks. But soon i realized that this is headache inducing too. Since then I try to think about if i really need this bookmark and also clean my bookmarks out every few months.

The few bookmarks i have get organized in simple folders like news, programming, books, <insert-current-project>, music. That's it. Done. Try to be minimalistic my friends! It's awesome!


I have many bookmarks too (10k+ -- firefox is not very fast handling them). Most of them not needed of course, but there have been several instances I tried to open something in my bookmarks and the site no longer existed... so obviously bookmarks also need to store the last viewed site content)


> so obviously bookmarks also need to store the last viewed site content

Yeah, just save every page you ever open to disk. Just in case. Right? Also sync all of that data on multiple machines. But what if the syncing service disappears some day? Better ask for a self-hosted solution. But a free one. Which saves everything. Just in case anything ever gets lost. How much better life would be then.


Saving much content to disk makes some degree of sense, and there are tools that already do this, though not at the user level (and increasingly incompletely as SSL/TLS transport becomes near universal): caching proxies.

Your browser also caches aggressively.

If targeted to specific high-value sites, or setting retention based on site / content value (some automatic, some less so, some short-lived, some logner), you'll end up with a useful and usable local archive with what is today very small amounts of storage -- even a few GB of text out of a TB or more, isn't much, and that would be a pretty extensive collection.

If the content can be reduced such that it's just necessary text (excluding web crud and more), the end result is likely much smaller still. I've experimented with reducing Washington Post articles and homepage to a simplified view, by selecting specific HTML elements, and the result weighs in at about 3-10% of the source page.

A typical online article likely runs about 800 words. If you read (or save) 20 articles a day for a year, thats about 300 MB.

You would eventually fill a 1 TB hard drive with text at that point. In about 3,400 years.


yeah. my bookmarks are basically for a quick access of things that i access over and over again, but that i can't reach out simply by typing in the address bar.


Pinboard. With Archive mode, Pinboard's full-text search spans the contents of PDFs, which is a godsend feature that saves me an hour or two a week (I bookmark a lot of research). I probably use Pinboard search more than Spotlight on my laptop.


I am building my own. I used to use Chrome bookmarks, but then started pushing everything to Pocket. Unfortunately Pocket's design doesn't handle a lot of things (like documents/videos etc) nor does it encourage reading much (it's easier to save than actually read).

So I am now building Liste[1] thinking of it as a more power-user focused tool.

Aim is to make Liste a powerful read/watch/listen-it-later + a personal knowledge base tool. In the long run I aim to replace goodreads/imdb et al with only source of truth in my life - all stored in Liste.

Beta launch is targeted in Q1 2020. Probably by mid-feb.

[1] https://getliste.com


Same here. From Chrome bookmarks to Firefox bookmarks to Pocket and now building my own.


I don't. I arrived to the conclusion that just collecting everything I find interesting doesn't make sense if I never consume the resulting collection.

When I see something that could be related to a project I have, and I know that I will check it in the near future, I save a copy of the web content to OneNote. But mostly I stopped caring about bookmarking/saving everything that I find interesting.


100%. I used to have massive bookmark collections all extremely well organized. But at some point in time I realized it was a huge amount of effort and rarely go back and use them.

For links I want to keep, for say education, related to a project I'm working on, or similar - I simply write them down in Inkdrop (notepad system of choice) under the relevant note/header. Honestly I don't often go back to those anyways, but they are there if I need them.

For other stuff that I want to keep around for longer, maybe "This will be interesting to read, I just don't have time now" - I send them to myself on Telegram (messenger of choice). It's search works and it's a great timeline. If I don't think about that article/topic again, or don't have free time to go back... then it gets buried and I probably will never see it again. But the link always exists and is searchable... so I don't feel like I've "lost" things completely.


Self-texting you on Telegram is a great idea. That way you don't feel the pressure to keep it organized, you have a way to find it if you need it in the next few days, and you have some sort of historical records. That's neat.


At one point I thought like this too, but then realized I also like to archive everything in case something jogs my memory and I want to go back and search the blob of "links that piqued my interest". So now I bookmark/save(reddit)/favorite(hn) everything that is even remotely interesting even if I have no intention of going back and consuming it. If the topic comes up again and I remember I bookmarked something like that, then I've got a jumping off point to dive deeper.


So, basically, you do. Your bookmarking structure is OneNote. You just scope what it is that you're going to save.


I used to collect a lot of bookmarks too, I sorted them in folders in the Firefox bookmark bar and thought it's important to keep track of them.

After switching to a different browser for a while I just didn't port them over and realized I actually don't need any of them (Except maybe 1-5 shortcuts for sites I open often, usually they are just pinned tabs now).

I'd suggest to give it a try. I don't think I ever had the problem that I couldn't find something again and if it's important enough there will be a way to find it again.


I use https://tefter.io (Disclaimer I'm a founder)

Usually my workflows are:

1. Use the chrome extension to add something

2. Sometimes I add tags or add it to a list

3. If it's related to work I'll add it to my work organisation

For links I come across on Slack, I use the Slack app (https://slack.com/apps/AFBC4A147-tefter) to quickly bookmark any links included in a message somebody posted.

When it comes to bookmarking, plenty of options out there. For me effective collaboration was the feature missing from most of them and that's why we're building Tefter.


any plans for a mac app?


There's an electron-based desktop app.

https://github.com/tefter/desktop


A while back someone on here posted a reply to a similar question for me - and it was one of those 'road to Damascus' moments for me.

The poster pointed out that we should not have to bookmark - that why do our own browsers not simply record every site we visits (and even cache the text for alter searching).

Its technically trivial. But we all have this blind spot - that it is perfectly reasonable for massive corporations to collect where we visit, but no-one, even in free browsers, thinks to record it for our own use later on.

I wish I could show you the link. But i cannot search my history and i did not bookmark it. :-(


> we all have this blind spot - that it is perfectly reasonable for massive corporations to collect where we visit

I don't think this is reasonable at all.


How ironic :p


I've been using Buku (https://github.com/jarun/Buku) for some time and I really like it. Allows for tagging, and even visualization. I normally use the web interface, but there are browser extensions and CLI available too.


I actually made a small webapp to deal with my bookmarks. It's unfinished so it's more a dump than anything at the moment. I can categorize bookmarks using a directory structure as well as tags, to deal with search more easily.

This was also a way for me to learn about browser plugins, to integrate a bookmark button in the browser's toolbar.

I intend to make it a public service at some point. For anyone interested : https://bmlite.net (most minimalst MVP ever :)) (I have ipv6 issues at the moment, sorry about connection issues)


Is this open source?


I used to bookmark pages frequently. I think at one point a few years ago I had more than 15,000 bookmarks in Firefox possibly dating back to 2001 or so (when I used IE!). (Edit: According to a file I have, I had 12,072 bookmarks on Aug. 1, 2015. As I recall this wasn't my peak.)

In practice, I found that by the time I would return to them (often years later), I frequently lost the context and the page went offline. So now I will typically instead paste the URL into an organized series of text file notes on various subjects, sometimes including a short summary of what interested me, a quote, or both. Even if I don't add a short note, I find that the categorization is more specific in the text file than the bookmarks, which helps contextualize the webpage. I'll also often either save the page to my hard drive or save it in Zotero, choosing the latter if I think I might cite it in a paper in the future.

I haven't stopped using bookmarks, but the bookmarks I have now are more ephemeral. I still sometimes fall into my old habits and use some bookmark folders for non-ephemeral things, but I've been getting better about this over the years. If it's in my bookmarks, it's probably not as important as what's in my text files.

A few years back, I did make a concerted effort to transfer as many of my bookmarks to text files as possible as well. I probably deleted over half of them in this process.

According to grep, I have approximately 43,957 URLs saved in my text files...


>So now I will typically instead paste the URL into an organized series of text file notes on various subjects, sometimes including a short summary of what interested me, a quote, or both.

This has been my way of doing it for some years. Usually end up writing a blog-ish sort of shorthand in sublime text with some thoughts and perspective to prime my later self on what I was thinking and why it caught my attention. Usually leave a few hanging questions for followup as well.


I don't use bookmarks anymore and just use the Pocket chrome extension.

https://app.getpocket.com/


Same issue as you. So I don't care anymore.

I have 10/15 bookmarks in the top toolbar that are releant to my work. All the rest goes into limbo, and I don't even bookmark much anymore.

When needed, I write notes (wiki, or paper) with links contextualized by topic/need.

The problem with bookmarks is those 3 together (that are required for bookmarks to be of any usefulness - to me anyway):

1) it's easy to create one, there should be more friction;

2) it's hard to have a long-term storage/indexing system (Delicious & equivalents were a good direction);

3) it requires a custom setup for bookmark search to be integrated.

Also, in the mid-term, most URLs are broken.

A paper notebook, on the other hand:

1) requires a conscious effort to note something done (and to have around also);

2) is relatively a secure & long term storage; it's discoverable;

3) the effort marks a memory inprint that helps indexing in long term memory, just for the "I remember I noted that down somewhere when I was in...".

My offline bookmarks/notes/snippets/activities feel way more productive and fulfilling than the computer-based ones in the long-term.


There's the lightweight approach of just deleting all your bookmarks and trusting you will be able to answer any future question for yourself. This is similar to choosing to live without a long-term todo list, trusting that anything that needs attention will present itself to your attention.

The latter has never really worked for me, so the heavyweight approach is to have a why-justified system. If you're going to save a bookmark, it had better be referred to in some checklist or documentation attached to a long-term project that you are actively working on, and that you've sufficiently justified as being a necessary part of your long term goals or values. In other words, any bookmark worth saving should be able to be attached to some sort of actionable tactic.

And as part of that, all of these projects (and bookmarks) need to be actively reviewed. If you aren't regularly reviewing them, then just delete them.


I created an app about a year ago called fav.sh. This isn't for your "everyday" bookmarks but moreso for things that you happen to come across on the internet and want to save. From there it backs up the bookmarks to Github Gist or a local file on your computer.

Right now it works, albeit not perfectly and is available for Chrome only. I recently open sourced the whole thing and plan to release a Firefox version as well.

Check it out if you are interested:

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fav-bookmark-manag...

Github: https://github.com/sgolovine/fav.sh


I keep it quite simple - I have a handful of folders related to my projects and hobbies. I add related links there, and sort through them, deleting bookmarks when no longer needed, probably once a month or so. For anything outside those topics, I add it to the main bookmarks bar in the browser, and catch up on those things on weekends, deleting them when read.

Of course, it sounds like we have different filters. You said you add a bookmark when you "saw something cool". I only add bookmarks that I believe will have a positive impact on the things I do in my life. There is new cool stuff online every day... I personally let most of it go by, because there will be something else tomorrow.


Hey I built https://www.linkdrop.co/ about 6 months ago to solve exactly that problem.

Linkdrop doesn't have any unread article lists. When you "save" an article, it queues it up to send it to you in an email the next day.

Since I've been using it I find that my actual bookmarks are things I want to save instead of just random articles. Makes things a lot cleaner :)

It's got a good number of users atm and things are running smoothly, it's also free. If you do use it, feel free to send me any feedback you have. I've been trying to find more time to hack on it and would love some more direction.


I had same issues as you (browsers even didn't have bookmark tags back then)! I used Pinboard for few years, until I adopted org-mode and Pinboard started feeling very clumsy and slow.

The benefit of org-mode (or any plaintext bookmarking) is that it makes it instantly searchable in my emacs. I accept that I probably will never have time to properly read through everything I clipped. But it works as a personal search engine: when I search for some topic/tool/etc., I run into some related stuff that I already clipped. It has higher information quality than googling it because my past self already found it interesting and curated these pieces of information. I describe my setup for searching in emacs here: [0].

Another benefit of org-mode is that I can add tags, notes and basically treat bookmarks as any other piece of knowledge I keep in my org-mode files.

Basically, I only use browser bookmarks for services (i.e. social networks/dashboards/etc) now. If it's some sort of knowledge or anything interesting, it gets clipped into org-mode.

For clipping pages into org-mode I tried using org-protocol [1] for bookmarking straight into org-mode; it was unreliable for me, so I wrote my own extension [2]

And finally, I'm working on a browser extension [3], that would unify 'bookmarks' and browsing history from anywhere, whether they are youtube lists/github stars/twitter likes/IM messages or even plaintext files on your filesystem

[0] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#personal_information

[1] https://github.com/sprig/org-capture-extension

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html

[3] https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#demo


I use Notion too. I have added Notion Webclipper extension to all my browsers on, to save link I have created lists based on category i.e study, tech, life, etc. While bookmarking I just add the link to the respective category. On Phone, Notion has this feature to share a link to the app to save the bookmark. Before this, I used Chrome Bookmark manager. A pocket is a good tool too but I am fed up with having an individual app for every use case(bookmarking, todo, calendar). Notion is one good service with all the features that I need as a student, but their Andriod UI suck. You can hit them up on twitter and request the feature to add tags.


I use Pocket but I've never once went back to look at a bookmark. It's mostly about just removing my FOMO if I close that one tab with that "really cool" article. Which that helps me keep everything a little more tidy.


I used to hoard lots of bookmarks to never look at them again.

It was a markdown file full of links, organized by a category, sometimes accompanied by a short comment. A never-ending backlog of articles, papers, videos, past live streams, blogs, and Hacker News threads that I will presumably come back one day.

I no longer save bookmarks and I no longer get a pressing urge to clear my backlog.

Recently, I have published a single HTML page on my personal website (ironically, called bookmarks.html) with a half-dozen of links that I found particularly remarkable. But the purpose here is to share good stuff with folks rather than look at it later when I have more time.


I run a bookmark manager on my home web server (accessible from the internet). I prefer that over managing bookmarks using browser facilities, because I can use bookmarks from any browser and any machine, anywhere. I also don't have to worry about losing bookmarks if I change browsers, replace the OS, etc.

I'm also a bit allergic to using some external service to do this -- that seems like a pointless loss of control to me.

(I use Online Bookmarks http://www.frech.ch/online-bookmarks/ for this)


Probably not what you're asking for, but I've recently started archiving interesting articles in a Git repository, especially those that I fear I would not be able to find again via search engine.

I store articles as Markdown (there are online converters that take a URL and extract the Markdown, e.g. http://fuckyeahmarkdown.com) with some manual cleanup. It's a bit expensive, which means that I only do it for stuff that I really really want to keep. I have about two dozen things in that folder by now.


I send links to getpocket.com from $device. I like to save the best ones, so I made a dumb tool to download them as rendered text files (glorified w3m -dump) which I organize in 3 folders that my tool syncs back upstream to GetPocket: favourites (which I keep locally and backed up), archived (local copy is deleted, but link kept in GetPocket), and deleted (sync deletes from local and GetPocket). The tool is http://github.com/srvaroa/repocket


I'm not much of a bookmarks guy, but I used to have the same problem 4 years ago when I used Facebook. I would find an interesting video or article, save it (very similar to bookmarking it but within Facebook), and then forget about it. Facebook even reminds you every couple of weeks that you have 10 saved articles that you haven't read.

And then it happened again with Reddit. Same thing: I save an interesting comment or post, and then never see it again. I sometimes go back to get a specific comment, but it takes forever to find it. So my solution was to make it some type of game. I find time every month to just attack those saved posts and comments, and check them out 1 by 1. Some of them are either videos that I couldn't watch at the time, or articles I thought I should read later. I watched the videos, read the articles, and then unsaved the posts. If their is a post I think there is a big chance I'll go back to again, I'll keep it saved.

After took me a couple of sessions to go through all my backlog, but after every session, I learn so much, probably laugh a lot as well, and my bookmarks are kept to an absolute minimum.

So yeah, no extension will help you, I'm sure more than half of your bookmarks are a one time read, many are also not interesting to you anymore, and those you really want to keep are less than a hundred.


I use vim and plain text files to keep track of interesting bookmarks in markdown format and also write a summary or important points. That way, if I need to search for something, all I need is a grep (or ripgrep). If the page is worth saving for future, I use Evernote's web clipper to save it so I can re-read or review it in the future. (I'm on Evernote free plan as I rarely go over the limit)

I used to be a heavy Delicious user before it went away.


Did you know that Delicious was bought by Pinboard? Maceij put it in permanent read-only mode and fixed the export feature to make sure people didn't lose their data. https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...


I keep the tab open until I read it... or just as likely, until I close it x months later. At least I won't have 5 year old bookmarks that I never looked at.


This way leads to madness. I have nearly 3000 tabs open. I'm trying to sort through them but it's a lot.


There's a Firefox extension named OneTab, it aggregates all your open tabs into a single page, closing every tab except the OneTab. I have mine pinned. That, or Ctrl+Shift+D in Firefox to bookmark all tabs. I tend to have 10+ tabs open myself but the thought of that many tabs gives me the heebie-jeebies.


Wow, thanks! OneTab has changed my life and also saved me about 1gb of memory.


Yes, it's easy to ignore open tabs too. No system is perfect but I do this to increase the chance of me reading or watching whatever it is. I wouldn't let it go to 3000 so it sort of works for me, better than bookmarks anyway!


I use Google Keep for saving anything I find interesting online. There's a chrome extension that you can use to do it from the browser. It allows you to write some text around the link/text you are saving. I write enough text so that I am able to find it by searching. I also give one standard label to these notes so these are not mixed up with other Keep notes for tasks, book notes etc.


I have a multi-layer approach that I recently documented in detail [1].

To summarize: 1. Chrome Bookmarks 2. Workona 3. Notion 4. Native Bookmark Sources (e.g. HN, Stack Overflow, Twitter)

The large bookmark library you are talking about lives in layer 3, Notion. I too have issues with its Web Clipper. However, I came to realize that it is a very good habit anyway to manually curate recently added bookmarks. I do it about twice a month and usually, I can throw out a good portion of the new additions because they do not seem quite as relevant on second look. The big advantage of having your bookmarks library in Notion is that you can relate to other databases in Notion, e.g. projects, blog posts, ideas.

Another important lesson: Be careful not to do too much bookmarking. A large library can feel overwhelming and most things can be easily found again with a simple google search.

[1] https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...


Short: Firefox with sync enabled for desktop and iOS browsing. I also save exported .html/.json backups to Google Drive. I use Instapaper for saving news articles.

Long: After many years of many systems, I now use FF bookmarks on desktop as my base for managing and organizing. A few months ago I pared down my collection significantly but still have a few thousand links. I only sync across FF using the built-in sync. Used Xmarks previously for Chrome/FF/Safari but that got too complicated and broke once they shut the service down. If I need to sync elsewhere I can just export from FF.

I utilize the built-in "Bookmarks Toolbar" folder for work/frequently accessed pages. I have a "To Sort" subfolder in there for bookmarks that I still need to categorize. I make folders for things that I'm researching or articles I want to read on desktop.

In the main "Bookmarks Menu" I have about 25 folders for different subject areas like Business/Employment/Money, Design, Development, Travel, etc. I have one folder where I keep track of accounts I have logins to. I have a "Buy" folder with a few different subfolders of brands or stores that I like.

Finally, there's a "Mobile Bookmarks" folder that contains bookmarks saved on FF iOS. This makes it easy to save things quickly on iOS and organize later on desktop. If you use Safari on iOS you can easily bookmark in FF by clicking the share button, selecting FF iOS (must be installed) and choosing "Bookmark This Page". You don't even have to exit Safari :)

In general I bookmark because I like curating all these unique areas of my internet life. I like having a list of personally vetted links that I can go back to when I need them, after my brain has moved on and my browser history has been cleared.


I have the same problem and have started using https://raindrop.io

Hope it serves you well


maybe I'm "that guy", but why does everything have to have thumbnails and icons these days? that's so much space that's wasted instead of harboring more information... we need more geeky, dense, info-rich UIs


I tried Raindrop.io and was impressed enough to get an annual subscription to it.

My main use case was to have a single place for all my bookmarks across Android, iOS, OS X and Linux, and across Firefox and Chrome.

Among all the solutions I evaluated, Raindrop.io had the best UX at the time.


Bookmarks themselves (save a few references), and many archival systems, aren't particularly useful, mostly because they impose far too much overhead into either classifying or using the resulting archive.

Manually tagging everything ... is tedious.

The inability to search content of bookmarks, or even, often to find the original content online (praise His Noodliness for the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine), is a major impediment.

Reading (and using) research tools which do allow and facilitate use, not merely archival, of references, is a complete game-changer, and makes clear that much of the present organisational conceit of Web content is highly flawed, with assumptions based on 20- 30-year-old system limitations, when disk was scarce, storage expensive, and local search difficult at best.

The focus of most vendors -- both proprietary and nominally free software -- around user-surveillance, tracking, and cloud-based platforms facilitating both, means that usable, user-controlled, local (or at least proximate) solutions ... are poorly developed, supported, and advertised (irony noted).

There are some. I'm encouraged by the mentions of projects in this thread. Pinboard, Pocket, Wallabag, and other options have some use.[1]

I still think the area's ripe for drastic improvement.

________________________________

Notes.

1. I make heavy use of Pocket. I remain largely disappointed,[2] though there's a recent Android client rewrite I'm meaning to try.

2. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_...


I created a basic Ruby script to bookmark, tag, and search from the command line. I drag links in from the browser to the terminal to use it. It uses a single flat text file in a Dropbox folder so it works across all of my machines too. If you're a developer and you live at the terminal, I recommend a similar approach as it's just so simple.


I threw everything in a checkvist (https://checkvist.com) list and generously annotated every bookmark with tags, now I have bookmarks and attached notes and it's searchable with tags, it works really good !

I think this offers the exact same thing as the popular pinboard but it's free !


Yep, Checkvist's Web Clipper allows adding tags via smart syntax, and there are versions both for Firefox and for Chrome


Hello, We think bookmark is not only a bookmark, but something we want to keep it to get back later. It could be a link, a hight light text, a note, a todo etc... , sometime a bookmark relates to a document (a file) or a people. At the end of the day we have a lot of things to keep but easily to forget. That the reason we think bookmark with #hashtag is the best way to mark some important keyword we could get back later easily. Beyond a bookmark is could be a thinking we want to keep, that 's why many people like to use private facebook post as bookmark. We did try to build a simple MVP of this idea at https://www.kocpit.com - bookmark management with #hashtag , with full text search support. Bookmark an URL , a file, a content, markdown, note etc by your way. Try it free.


My approach is to keep adding those to github wiki using a simple bookmarklet which asks me for a link name and url

https://github.com/maciejjankowski/2020/wiki/Jan

good things: it is stored as a markdown file for each month, it is a github repository, so it can be edited either online or in text editor, it is quite easy to search it using command line tools or 'find in folder' option from text editor

missing features - tags, longer descriptions

bookmarklet code: https://gist.github.com/maciejjankowski/312800dd22fbd8cd8f07...


I use Worldbrain's Memex[1] in order to do full-text search on the pages that I bookmark / visit. This way I'm able to easily find anything that I've read in the past.

[1] https://getmemex.com/


A lightweight online utility to host them as JSON so I can edit them from anywhere and then export to Netscape Bookmark format. The specification of the format is probably the silliest one on the entire web [1]. Then importing manually the HTML to all browsers on all machines, sigh. Looking around for some self-hosted solution or established but necessarily lightweight online solution.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...


I use Toby as a Chrome extension and new tab page:

http://www.gettoby.com/

I find it has some tiny glitches with drag and dropping to rearrange, but otherwise it's free and works pretty well.


In addition to my browsers (Vivaldi) built in bookmark tool which I use for categorization, I’ve been using Google Custom Search to add bookmarks, interesting information, and solutions to problems to a private index. I have a browser shortcut setup to search my private index. When I feel like I’ve seen something before or know generally what I’m looking for I’ll search that index first before going to Google proper. The biggest downside is that adding urls to the index is manual. I was going to create a bookmarklet or browser extension but I haven’t been able to find a public API for adding urls to the Google Custom Search index.


I save URLs of particular interest in my command-line notes tool, and save urls visited with reckless abandon using OneTab, or now, by exporting URLs with AppleScript or directly from Browser Session files.

I think of Gwern's https://www.gwern.net/Archiving-URLs

Which gets part of the way to having a full index, and gives you offline searchability.

As noname120 mentioned, the "memex" extension indexes what you read, but I found the slowdown from indexing work interfered with normal browsing too much for me. Maybe batched, or manually triggered, indexing would work for me.


Most of my "bookmarks" are just HackerNews or Reddit posts that I've upvoted. Outside of those two, it's too inconvenient to save webpages. Think about it: with upvoting a post, you not only get one-click convenience but also automatic context (comments, subreddits) that almost beats tagging. It'd be nice if someone can generalize this; make any link or text on the web easily save-able and comment-able. I've looked into web annotator extensions like Liner or Hypothes.is but they don't provide I'd like. Why is the most common way to share a snippet from an article to screenshot it?


I have two processes, depending on the content:

1. If I find something that looks interesting, but I don't know why or for what, I bookmark it and put it in a bookmark folder "To Read" in order to read later.

2. For things where there is a specific need it addresses (e.g., is relevant to a project I'm working on), I usually have one or more design docs going for each project I work on, and the link gets dropped into the reference section of the doc. That way, I can find it easily in the context of the thing I'm trying to do, and when I share the doc with others, they also will know where I'm coming from with my ideas.


While reading the comments I thought, "Surely there's a way to auto-submit bookmarks to the Wayback Machine, yes?" A moment of searching unearthed a Firefox extension for doing that. The commit logs at the Github repo show continual development since 2015.

Installer: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/archiveror/

Repo: https://github.com/rahiel/archiveror


It looks like everyone is building their own thing... So am I: https://trackr.sh

I have a couple of thousand bookmarks, which as some might say is a ridiculous amount. Except they aren't really bookmarks in the strict sense. For me they are webpages that contain useful information. Some bookmarks don't get opened for years but I know that if I ever need information on compiling SBCL I can click the tags 'sbcl' and 'compilers'. Searching the internet for that exact article probably wouldn't get me what I found 4 years ago.


I use 3 levels of "importance" for them.

The actual browser bookmarks, with stuff that has proven itself useful and I end up searching for it at least a handful of times a year.

Notion Web Clipper to dump everything else on a "need to organize" file on Notion.

A couple times a month I go into the "need to organize" file, read anything that was there as a "read later" and remove them, simply remove anything that looking back doesnt seem like will be useful on the next year, and move everything else and then categorize/add tags to a "useful links" file also on Notion.

Before Notion I've used Pocket similarly.


I use slack to manage bookmarks. I was using Toby Chrome plugin, but after 1000 bookmarks, its search is really slow. Slack is awesome for personal use because you can easily search for links you written, and organize with new channels. Discord may be a better alternative, because there is no limit to how many messages you have.

I agree with monkeynotes that you have to be mindful on how much time you spend collecting bookmarks, I felt consumed at one point and unproductive because you skim, you save, and you find other links to the original link you are saving. Probably set a time limit to how long you spend.


Im using Mailist App to collect bookmarks which are then composed in a weekly, personal newsletter. That makes me actually read then and not only store and forget :)


I use Wallabag - https://wallabag.org/en . It's a read-it later style bookmark app. It's opensource, so you can self-host it.


I have been accumulating links at https://dotat.at/: since 2002. It is super low-effort: rather than tagging, I rely on keywords in the title (which I try to adjust to be more searchable). I don’t try to read all the stuff: the links are partly an aide memoire in case I want to go back and dig deeper on a subject. Some of the links I refer to fairly often. (I should probably move my old static bookmarks page to my link log since I use my link log way more now so it is more convenient in practice.)


I keep a few folders roughly organizing interesting links.

I heard an old trick to avoid overspending. Bookmark an item, and look back in a week. If you still want it, buy it!

I don't have that overspending problem, but I find it applies well to bookmarks. I clear it out once a week, it's a very fun chore. Looking back with a fresh mind, many things are not interesting to me, and those things that are, I can invest time in to look at.

Useful looking tools or programs, I usually file away permanently to another bookmark, because I find myself looking back there many months later :)


I use https://are.na for this. Several private channels and have the FF extension installed so that I can add to them while I browse.


This is so interesting because this question comes up about two times per year.

Please reach out to me (contact info in my profile) as I have a side project I would like to resurrect that tackles these same issues.


With the death of del.icio.us many moons ago, I imported to diigo.com and still use it. Many of the things i bookmark are technical learning related so tend to tag easily and self organize on those tags. I'm just using the free tier, no need for all the fancy paid stuff they offer myself. Importantly, you can export your data as a backup - no vendor lock in.

I use the basic .js bookmarklet in Firefox to add links quickly, no addons or extensions required. Android app is OK but I uninstalled it after not using it for a long time.


Many thanks for your feedbacks!

What stays in my mind :

1. Try to not use bookmarks for long terms. Keep useful information in a personal wiki, website, ... It's probably the best way to remember information and to be able to refind them when needed.

2. If you still need to use bookmarks, there are lots of custom tools. I checked all of your submission and there is some very nice stuff. It all depends on your use on how you use bookmarks :)

I like how Toby allows organizing bookmarks per session. I'm gonna give a try to this tool, but with a limited number of bookmark.


I got addicted to del.icio.us in its heyday, so once it got acquired and subsequently sunset I wrote https://savecrate.com and haven't looked back. The ability to save anything (public/private) without having to weigh whether it's "important enough" and retrieve it quickly via search/tags (eliminating the necessity of messy folder/hierarchical structures) is indispensable to my workflow.


My home page is a hand crafted page of links to the sites I use the most. Each row contains links on a particular type of site like social networks, financial sites, news sites, hobby sites etc. I have a simple script that makes it easy to add a new site, but I haven't added one for a couple of years. Bookmarks are still just a big list in a menu - sites I don't want to forget about, but not ones I visit often. So when I need to visit one, searching the list isn't too onerous.


Emacs, org-mode, tags, GitHub private repo & daily journaling


The best solution is to not make bookmarks.

Every bookmark you create is a time commitment at a later date. The more you have, the less time you have available at any later point in time.


that's bad advice. bookmarking is very valuable in this day and age. websites and blogs you swear you have seen before won't appear in search result! searching is failing us but we can start to trust our bookmarks again.


I built devmark.io a couple of years ago but it never took off - never went beyond a Chrome extension. It is a bookmarking tool designed so it didn't feel like you were collecting urls - you'd save them and rely on the search function (which isn't that advanced unfortunately - postgres full text search). I still use it myself but hosting costs about 300euro every year so it's a questionable investment from my own point of view.


That sounds high for a few text searches a day. Do you have a large number of sites saved?


No, just that. The joys of running on Heroku!


I use Bear (https://bear.app/) for all my note taking, and use that to organize any links that I might want to come back to later. Its search is effective enough that I'm always able to find what I'm after. Evernote or other apps would also probably work well for this, but I really like Bear's design and ability to manually tag things while writing.


pinboard.in

It's great (again).

I have around 3.5k bookmarks, sloppily tagged, and it's such a great resource to have.


Another vote for Pinboard. I have over 12,000 bookmarks. It's simple, fast, and flexible. You do need a system for choosing tags or things can get lost easily.


I loved pinboard.in and had the subscription with archival support for more than 5 years. However, the search "full-text" did not work all the time. I used to get some server-side error. As a bookmark only tool, it still works excellent almost all the time.


During the time when Maciej was campaigning (he supported several US Senate candidates), Pinboard was constantly broken. Archiving rarely worked.

Now that he's again paying attention to his service, I haven't had issues again.


That makes sense. I may try archival plan again and see if it works consistently.


seconded... I love my pinboard. It's nice to have bookmarks, it's much nicer to be able to find them later.


I've been using Google Chrome's bookmarks and I'm pretty happy with the cross device capabilities.

I ended up creating folders to manage my workflow GTD-style. It turns out everything in my life has a URL.

- START (Workspace, Email, Calendar)

- INBOX (Random things that come up)

- TODO (Next Actions)

- PROJECTS (Things that can't be done in one step. One subfolder for each)

- OFTEN (Reference, Documentation, Utils etc)

- LATER (Anything I want to read later, I empty this every couple of months. This is just a procrastination busting hack)


I use Twitter. I tweet out links I like, and search in Twitter when I try to find something I remember. The added bonus is that others can discover the links too.


All my bookmarks live in my wiki.

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/

Searched and parsed with Alfred workflow.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind

The bookmarks are links under ## Links heading of any markdown file. Here are few with some links

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/programming-languages/go

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/programming-languages/go/go-...

https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/machine-learning

There is lots more. Around 16,000 lines of markdown in the wiki now. Writing the code to meaningfully parse it now.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nikitavoloboev/status/12165452379...

Here are all the topics included in the wiki. Enough to learn for a life time.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge/blob/master/SUMM...

Oh and the wiki of course does not include private links. Those live in my main browser (Safari) and are searched with workflow too.

https://github.com/deanishe/alfred-safari-assistant

And I optimized the top sites to be most popular pages I visit to get my news on mobile. Accessed by opening new tab.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-ios/blob/master/README....

On mac I go as far as binding certain sites to open with a single key using Karabiner. ie pressing b + n opens https://hckrnews.com

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/dotfiles/blob/master/karab...


This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.


I use https://ulluminate.com/

It lets me add links into different collections easily and I can even share those collections with other people if I want. It's really nice to be able to just share a collection of links when someone ask for something. Ex. I have a nice collection of recipes that I can just share out when someone ask me for a recipe for something.


I use a mostly flat structure and rely on tags to categorize my bookmarks.

Usually if the info is somewhat important to me, I'll copy the snippet I need into a notebook (Joplin, I use tags there as well), and also send a request to archive the page on the Wayback Machine as a safeguard, so I can search that URL there later on if needed.

The hardest part is to categorize and tag the content correctly so that you don't spend a lot of time searching.


I love Bookmark Manager extension (Chrome) but Google suddenly killed it :( so now my only option is Chrome built-in bookmarks. Bookmark must be really quick and easy using with a couple of clicks to add/access so all external website options are not relevant to me. Pocket and Keep are the best alternatives with their Chrome extensions but unfortunately I already use them for reading/noting respectively.


Add them to a journal I keep. They become part of my day's activity.

I don't use the web browser bookmarks for "keeping" anything. Web browsers have a tendency to "misplace" them for all sorts of reasons. Brave on ios recently destroyed all my favorites I had on the empty tab screen when I recently applied an update. Glad I had them in my journal.

Project related bookmarks go in a file associated with that project.


I've used URL Manager Pro for years...very pleased with it (Mac only). http://www.url-manager.com/ It creates a local bookmarks file; folders/subfolders; search; each bookmark has a Notes field; I sometimes copy a clip from the website into Notes to act as search bait. I use it to build a professional library.


I too have created command line terminal application specifically for this. My solution is to be able to add any metadata to bookmarks with full text search. No release yet, there are bugs but it's perfectly usable (have been using it for months now). https://github.com/tryffel/bookmarker


I decided to make my own system, but I wanted one that gets better as others use it. The idea is to find everything related to a learning resource (book, summary, author's TED talk, podcast) on a single page, asking with other users' reviews and famous experts' recommendations. Do give it a try:

https://LearnAwesome.org

It's FOSS, of-course.


The bookmark manager built into the latest version of Microsoft Edge is adequate and inoffensive

My philosophy is that the bookmarks toolbar is for "tools" and things I want myself to visit more often (a page for a good habit or a project)

Other bookmarks are split into basic categories like "Media" (A/V content), "Vintage" (old/nostalgia websites), "Games" & etc.


I use my bookmarks religiously

Bookmark Folder : Description

Files : Browser based files I want easy access to. These are generally static pages or anything I do data entry into (google drive docs, flowcharts). Things I could feasibly download a copy of.

Reports : Dynamic pages that let me get a measurement on something

HowTo : I often google how to do something, and when i find a result that i actually use it goes in here

Tools : Web tools, like JSON pretty print. These are pages that provide an automatic service of some kind (i.e input / output processes)

Index : Informational Directories. Examples include Code of federal regulations, RFC pages, interesting / useful wiki articles, cheat sheets, comprehensive guides that go beyond "howto", repositories, etc

Reading : Blog posts, case studies, technical writings, articles, things meant to be part of a conversation or a showcase

Communities : Social home pages that are mostly already bookedmarked into my finger tips like HN, reddit, stack overflow, facebook, etc

Learning : Items that still need to be 'digested'. Stuff from here is often moved to other folders after I am done with it.

Misc : (a word i only like to use once, if at all, in organizing). Basically, if all i do is take a glance at something and want to come back to it later - it goes in here

Each of these main folders denote mutually exclusive types of content (imo). Within each of these folders I create subfolders as needed to group things together by topic.

Add-ons

Additionally, I use a tab manager add-on. Currently I use "Cluster" for google chrome but I am looking into switching to TabXpert. When multiple sets of pages form a cohesive context, I save that context as a collection of tabs. For example, if I am working on an analytics project I may have various HowTo's, documentation, files, and Learning tabs open that are all related to my project. I save that window, and then instead of digging through ALL my book marks I can keep a running session of relevant pages. Some of which I know are only relevant for the project and do not need to be bookmarked.

When I start a new project, I collect relevant pages from my existing bookmarks into a new context.


I use this: https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

It's a self hosted web application. I host it on my homelab server. It will also archive the bookmarks so you can view them offline. FireFox and Google Chrome addons are available too. You can also import bookmarks from Pocket.


The most organized approach I've taken so far was self-hosting Shaarli. There's also an app and browser extensions exist as well I believe.

Although now I do a more low-key approach, just storing them in a flat list and for current topics that interest me I create folders. My "focus interests" change quite rapidly so I don't care about archiving anymore.


Another vote for self-hosted Shaarli.

I currently have 4319 links, collected over 13 years and 8 days (started with Delicious, then Pinboard).

Link rot and relevance is an issue, and I rarely go back to links that are more than a year old.

I don't delete broken links though, I like to think my Shaarli is a fair representation of my interests over the years.

I recently developed a Shaarli extension for Ulauncher. [0]

[0] https://ext.ulauncher.io/-/github-sebw-ulauncher-shaarli


This is a funny post. I wrote my own too. https://savedbits.com


Hi, I wrote a tool that I use my self and it works more or less like good old del.icio.us it is called https://yabs.io and I would love if you would be kind enough to try and and give some feedback. Main idea is tagging - that's help me to find things later when I need this bookmark.


I'm so glad you posted this question. It gave me a reason to see how many bookmarks I have in Chrome. 32/screen x 33 screens = 1,056 (according to Siri). My list seems pretty manageable: I search it many times daily for specific sites, and after all these years have a general idea of where they are, in terms of top/middle/bottom.


...wow, am I the only one who just exports Firefox's bookmarks into a JSON file (Backup bookmarks) and uses that to sync accross his devices?

I'm often on trips for a few days to a couple of weeks, and I only need to shift back and forth between my laptop and desktop.

If I find something interesting on the phone, I just look it up later on a computer to save the bookmark.


I was thinking about this. Someone ought to make a tool that exports browser bookmarks into a static, but presentable startpage.


I stopped bookmarking 99% of stuff the better part of a decade ago. I have these folders:

- Church: (links I frequently use related to my religion, such as the tithing payment portal and shared Google docs)

- STB: (stuff to buy) stuff I want to buy eventually but aren't immediate priority and stuff I think I want to buy.

- STB House: (inside the STB folder) stuff I want to purchase for a house when I purchase a house. Fiance and I plan to start looking as soon as she has an employment contract here (teacher).

Then I keep a few things on the bookmark toolbar not in a folder: uvere login portal, the YouTube subscriptions page, my HRA portal, Hulu, Netflix, Disney+, my training log (strength athlete).

That's it. I simply don't bookmark anything else anymore. If I want to reference something later, and think it will be in the near future, I leave it open in a tab.

If I want to save something for possible future reference I clip the page/article to Evernote and tag it how my brain works. Frequently this is Wiki entries (that get archived as the wikiwand version) and lengthy articles/blog posts. This actually makes the content useful as I can search an idea/topic in the future and find relevant stuff.

When I find a non-fiction kindle title useful, I open it in Calibre and print it to PDF, I then add the PDF to Evernote as well and tag it accordingly.


I have my bookmarks on google sheet and served using api. I am using flask to serve those over the web. Added a search functionality to make it easier to search for it Anyways you can check it out https://bookmarks-flask.herokuapp.com/


I put them in Evernote together with other notes and papers and stuff, and it's searchable there.

For dynamic content I save a bookmark, but for various articles and posts I can save the whole readable content which is nice, because otherwise if I want to follow up a five year old bookmark there's a good chance that it's gone now.


I just create a new folder and that pushes all the other ones to the bottom of the pile, and then I forget everything more than 1 year old... Forwards ever! :/

Seriously though, I can't believe it's 2020 and browser makers haven't updated the way bookmarks are saved, they should have had search functionality years ago...


Google Chrome has bookmark search now :)


Yes, within the bookmark manager, but not on the main search bar... It should be much easier to use in that way... :/


I try to only bookmark things that a) I visit repeatedly (multiple times per day), b) are not available from the "landing page" (filtered views, sub pages, complicated urls... anything that takes more than one click to get to), and c) are not easily memorized.

Anything thats "read later" goes to pocket.

Everything else just gets googled.


A little bit complicated but I organize my bookmarks in Markdown and put them on my website which is generated by Hugo.


I have a git repo at ~. .gitignore includes * with some exceptions, ~/.config/qutebrowser being one of the exceptions.

Edit: I mostly ignore mobile but I created https://smscp.xyz/ which I use to transfer text snippets such as URLs if I care enough.


I use start.me It is free to use, but I paid for the lifetime subscription and it hasn't let me down. I can use it between browsers, and I can access it from machines that aren't even my own. It is a browser based solution, but when I set it to my home page it is almost second nature to use.


Maybe I'm old school, but I use bookmarks for urls I go to often. Bank, router, some services I run, hobby sites.

I keep it extremely slim and only add if I'm going to it a lot. If I find something cool, I generally email it to myself or put it in a draft email full of links with topics next to it.


i have made my own (because why not): https://pinplz.com/ . I tried to make it as simple as single-pressing the bookmarklet because usually i have nothing to add to the bookmark. plus it saves an archived copy


Cute. Does it search within the cached pages? What's the search performance for very large bookmarks collections (10000+ bookmarks)? Is it possible to import / export / backup?


none of the above. but i will try to implement them soon


Exactly what I was searching for! Do you plan to create a business out of this or is there a chance for open sourcing/self hosting?


thats a good idea to open source it, after cleaning up the code. I plan to keep it running for the foreseeable future since i use it. I have added self-service ads for now.


Will keep an eye on it. Good work! Btw. thanks for the simple registration ;-)


Besides pushing articles I want to read later to Pocket I tend to use the principle "if I cannot remember the name/address of the website, I do not need to bookmark or visit it". Browsers nowadays are excellent at autocompletion which kind of supersedes bookmarks.


Your browsing history usually expires after some time (in Firefox anyway, haven't checked other browsers but they'll likely do something similar). If you want to keep something long-term, better bookmark it. You can just bookmark pages as a hint to tell the browser not to expire them, and then still access them through the address bar, without spending time on organizing your bookmarks.


I usually just download an offline copy of the page if I want to keep it long-term. (I'm talking about text data like guides or articles of course)

Browsing my youtube playlist library I can see that bookmarking is not enough if the link dies after a couple years.


my solution has been bookmark in Pocket -> Zapier -> MakeMySummary -> Todoist

1. Collect in Pocket 2. On a new add to Pocket trigger a Zapier task to Summarize it 3. Summarize the item in MakeMySummary https://www.makemysummary.com. Although this is optional, i find it easier to have some sense of the item i bookmarked without reading/viewing it fully. And i built it in my spare time to solve this exact problem. 4. On Summary done, Zapier will make a Todoist Task for me to review at a later time

Added benefit with Pocket is its searchable, so if and when i need, i can look up something i bookmarked. Google links expire as several noted in the comments.


I am using also a tool build myself called TagSpaces, you can see it action here: https://www.tagspaces.org/usecases/bookmark-manager/


When I find something interesting I add it to a daily email digest I send to myself.

Subject line: 1/24/2019 Rk Digest Body: all the links, plus a description

Not the most efficient, but gets the job done for now. Thinking of a better way to do it, perhaps some sort of digital garden.


I have a system of home-grown topics, but the real innovation is also having a system of monthly "2020 Jan" folders for catch all.

This means on the off chance that I get some time to go thru the backlog, I can tackle a single month and still feel like I made progress.


I used to use WordPress's PressThis plugin to bookmark anything interesting, I would add categories or tags but I ran into same issue as you.

But I haven't found anything better. I don't want to use a 3rd party closed-source apps, so it limits my options.


Bookmarks are write-only for me. I create them in Firefox (for personal) and Chrome (at work) and rarely if ever use most of them. As in I don't recall looking up a single bookmark in the last two months, but also only created a handful or two.


I have a folder called "To Read" where I keep articles that I plan on reading eventually. Within that folder there's a sub-folder called "Read" that's pretty self-explanatory.

I have an Instapaper account but I almost never use it.


https://raindrop.io


Looks amazing and has a generous FREE tier!


I have this problem too. In fact, I built a tool to better serve my own needs [0]. It helps to categorize links based on keywords. Best for article links but also works for generic links, as long as a title and description is present.

[0] Stackkup.com


http://stackkup.com


I made and use https://historio.us. It gives me full text search on my bookmarks, so I can find stuff right away easily. I need to update it, but it works well.


I use Larder (larder.io) - it has extensions and you can easily pick a category when you add. Also has good search and RSS feeds for folders. I subscribe to a few of the feeds that I use as a "read later" bucket.


Using pearltrees.com for a while. I usually keep them well organised but when I want to find something, i usually do a search. Using historysearch.com these days, which is more inline with modern day needs i believe.


I use libre office spreadsheets. You can export them to xhtml.

One column for the url another for notes. I have about 10 sheets organized by topic. I click on the xhtml file and it opens in the browser and my links are all there.

Very flexible, easy.


apart from a handful of internal urls I regularly need at work, which I have as actual web browser bookmarks, I stopped using bookmarks to remember "sites of interest"

instead I've been using Microsoft OneNote

I can group the bookmarks in a few different ways (Notebooks > Sections > Pages > block within page) but more importantly I can write some notes about the link and why it is interesting and how it relates to other links in the same topic I've saved

the things I like about OneNote are: it's free, works ok, and syncs between macOS desktop app and Android app


Ummmm, should I be worried that I bookmarked this for "later" ?


I stopped using bookmarks because I just use the browsing history instead.

On browsers I bookmark pages I want to come back to, but it's usually like 3-5 bookmarks before i wipe the browser completely again.


I use my browser bookmarking system. iCloud for personal use, Google Sync for work. This is for frequent bookmarks, for archiving I use Pinboard / Evernote clipper (is really good!)


I use Wallabag (https://wallabag.org/en) which is similar to Pocket, except that you can self host it.


with thumbnails! i can quickly "see" what the bookmark is about better than i can tag it. and thumb images are automatic while tags require effort. generally this and chronological sort gets me by. check out my speed dial extension for ff, its open source of course, please feel free to comment to contribute!

https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial


1. Nameless icons in the bar of most visited pages.

2. Folders of topic/ project specific info pages.

3. 'Reading List' Chrome extension for one offs and things I want to come back to.

Biannual pruning of the folders.


Why not just use emacs org-mode?

https://github.com/oriansj/orgmode-bookmarks


I've been using Bookmark OS for years and am more than happy with it https://bookmarkos.com


I tried managing them, but I've settled on deleting anything over a year old. There are a lot of interesting things out there, but the opportunity cost is high.


YSK In firefox you can confine your awesomebar search to just your bookmarks by typing a * first.

The biggest problem with bookmarks is pages that don't have descriptive titles.


In Firefox I set all my bookmarks with a blank title so the bookmark bar is just a list of icons from my top sites that I can click on easily + a couple of folders.


5000 are too many. I always spend a morning in weekend to read the things I bookmarked. If I don't read them, that means they are not that important.


Not interested in people's custom projects, nor having my bookmarks coupled to a browser. Currently I have bookmarks with my chrome profiles, but I'm planning to move them all to a simple, personal archive.

* At the very least, I just need a text file with a dump of links * More interesting would be something more useful like a database with titles, comments, maybe even saved copies of pages * Most awesome would be my own, simple, html home network website where I can navigate my bookmarks visually, have search, etc.

Any suggestions for making this process easier would be very welcome


I use an app, DevonThink. It lets me put downloaded pages into folders, with an auto classification function. I have full text search on the pages.


I often used a Chrome extension called Toby, it has some essential feature: 1. easy to categorize 2. sync on a different 3. share with your friends


Stopped using them after Firefox sync destroyed my very well curated set I had about 10 years ago. Now I copy paste text snippets into Google keep.


> I have more than 5000 bookmarks on firefox. I tried to add keywords and descriptions, but it takes me too much time to do that every time.

Create directories?


Im using Firefox aswell and I try to keep every link in its fitting folder, aswell as tagging them. Works for me but I only have around 250 max.


I wrote a simple HTML-page, with a jQuery based presentation layer, which allowed me to handle them under revision control

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

Unfortunately opening this now `file://///bookmarks.html` doesn't allow loading the resource as a security issue. So I've exported all my bookmarks and deleted them.

I have the old history for reference, but I've just decided not to bookmark in the future.


I used to use pinboard.in - now I just put everything I want to read into Instapaper.

I hardly bookmark sites that don't contain articles for reading.


I try to keep them on a minimum. Either act upon them or delete them. I value my time. Safari / Firefox are ok for this :)


I will recommend trying out https://refind.com/


* the native bookmarks management system in Google Chrome

* random items in Google Keep

* Instapaper

* Pocket

I am not proud of this. The last time I felt under control is when I used del.icio.us.


Switched to https://refind.com instead of bookmarks.


How does this work? The name and the promise is great but I'm skeptical.


I really love Instapaper. I have the chrome extension installed so whenever I'm on a site I want to bookmark I just do cmd-shift-s. Instapaper bookmarks it and saves/indexes the full text. When I want to look for it later I can search pretty easily. I don't use it much for offline reading, more as a simple way to search through everything I've read or want to read so I can quickly find a link again in the future.


The real question: How are people bookmarking this post? Myself, I'm saving it within hn.


http://tentacle.rupy.se


I use Pocket and tags in there. Also downloads the sites for offline / persistent storage.


I use groupmarks.com very cool. You can share with team, screenshot, organize them, ...


I use Next browser to handle my bookmarks, tagging, searching filtering, etc...


Firefox bookmarks. Sync and powerful search in the speed bar with mnemonics


I used to work at the company that built https://gurn.io/ it's a bit different to bookmarks but the sharing features have been amazing. My entire team at work uses it now.

The tldr is it maps urls to key words / phrases that we input. Those mappings go into a shared list, using the browser extension you can then search for them in the browser bar.

We tend to plow in tons of stuff, some of which we may never use, but countless times I've bashed in a phrase out of pure hope and found a team member or me in the past have added the resource in.

Lists are a bit like repos, you can have private ones just for you or you can share them, and they can all be searched at the same time.

It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's free at the moment for non-enterprises.


I use emotional memory.

Examples:

Was it to do with climate change? Check the emails to my sister.

Was it some geeky thing? Check the emails to my brother.

Was it to do with teaching? Check the hyperlinks list that I created in MS Word (Outline view).

Was it ego-boosting? Check my HN comments.

Was it to do with other interests, such as shares, bridge, Twitch, solar, …? Check my Chrome folders.

Was it political, e.g. Trump? Check my MS Edge browser bookmarks.

Was it software related? Check my Facebook "Saved" list.

Was it biology-themed? Check my Facebook posts.

Is it a link needed daily? Make it a shortcut on my Edge/Chrome start-up page.

This gives a number of categories that are easily remembered, because of the emotional connections, and can be readily searched.

Lastly, I mostly use Chrome, because if I don't explicitly save a recent interest, I can quickly find it with Chrome's History (Ctrl-H).


The simplest way - I don't have any!


I love papaly.com. It is extremely good.


I miss Delicious.


helm-chrome-bookmarks inside of emacs


Pinboard.


simple: I email the link to myself with keywords in subject, message, etc.


If it's good enough to remember I'll find it again. No need to save them




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: