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Ask HN: How do you organize your list of bookmarks to read later?

5 points by alexkon ↗ HN
I love to read a lot online, but there is only so much time to read articles and watch video lectures. I now have accumulated a backlog of several thousand bookmarks I might want to read later (currently in Pocket and OneTab for Chrome). I’m never going to actually read everything. I need a way to organize that volume of bookmarks to be able to fish out all links on a specific topic or those that are relevant to my current work.

So I’m looking for a super-efficient solution that would not draw away my attention from the actual content during day-to-day use. I tried Pocket, Readability, and Instapaper. They all share the same drawbacks.

First, when you decide to read something and you open the original link (because the images or the video are missing or the formatting has been removed), you have to go back to the list and archive your bookmarks. There’s no option to open the original link and archive the bookmark in a single click. (OneTab has this, but it doesn’t support tagging very well.)

Second, most articles are actually coming from a relatively small set of websites. Sometimes I want to sort all bookmarks by domain and open those from a couple of specific websites. Other times, I want to assign a tag to a whole domain, so that the tag would be automatically applied to all bookmarks from that domain, both existing and future.

Carefully tagging every link individually feels like a waste of time. Am I wrong here? Do you tag everything in your to-read library manually at the time you are adding a link?

If there are no existing solutions, I’m starting my own read-it-later service. :)

10 comments

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mertnesvat
I'm using Kifi (https://www.kifi.com). It's like a bookmarks. Moreover its not just a read later for links also clustering links organize to different topics etc.
hoof_marks
i'm using papaly.com. its a bookmarking app. Categories within topics and then the link. The link allows you to add a note also. best is the developers take in all feedback and come out with better options.

But i rely on the chrome bookmarks also. And organize folders as and how my work or line of thinking moves.

But i guess many of us want much better bookmarking services than perhaps available presently.

swah
Use pinboard's Read Later or Save to Pocket and forget it forever.
brudgers
To a first approximation, everything I have ever book marked to read later has never been read. I'd guess the rate is probably around 1:400 over 20 years of web browsing.

I still bookmark stuff anyway. I just don't worry about reading it.

riyadhworks
I am using browser bookmark to read webpage later
orky56
Tags in Evernote via the Evernote Clipper Chrome Extension. It's just as important for me to read something later as it is to organize which category it should go into. Tagging allows me to do both independently.
tmaly
I used delicio.us back in the day before yahoo dumped it. I moved to Google bookmarks. Its a horrible interface, but it lets me store the bookmarks. Finding them again is next to impossible. Pocket I tried but the read it later feature would mess up articles that had code in them.

I had this idea at one point to make a system that auto organized the bookmark added by 2 or 3 concepts and you would choose the best one out of the suggested. It would be like having your closet organize itself.

kek918
I also tend to bookmark a lot of articles, but very rarely go through my list. I tried Pocket after Firefox forced it upon me, but after throwing a couple articles in there I realised I might as well throw it in /dev/null - that's not Pockets fault though, it's mine for not having enough time or <insert a reason here>.

However, I've noticed a benefit of just throwing articles into my bookmarks. Whenever I search for a specific issue, Firefox[0] will show auto-complete suggestions from my bookmarks. I keep a list of useful posts from StackOverflow etc and it saves me a couple of clicks here and there.

It's like my own little search archive before I press Enter and let Google do its magic.

[0]: I guess other browsers do this as well, I just use Firefox as my primary browser. You can verify this in about:config (browser.urlbar.suggest.bookmark)