Ask HN: How to handle bookmarks so you can find them again?
This may be too pedestrian a topic for HN but I have so many bookmarks that when I had another one it disappears into the pile never to be seen again. I do use folders but now there are tons of folders, too, I've tried Trello, and I tried pocket briefly but it didn't seem quite right though maybe I didn't give it a chance.
My latest experiment is Google Bookmarks and I'm toying with just a simple either HTML page I add and categorize bookmarks on or a simple app to make managing them easier. Any suggestions on something to try?
To be perfectly honest it's possible the problem is me and not taking an organized approach, not tools that are the problem. Maybe I'm waiting for the bookmarking solution to solve a problem with clutter.
51 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadMy current strategy has just been to accumulate hundreds-thousands of tabs in my browsers and basically rely on firefox's "save tabs from last session" feature to keep history. Downsides are that these aren't synchronized across all my browser instances. But this allows me to quickly scroll through the tab set, pick a tab, consume it, and just close it to mark as complete.
I used to dump snapshots of my working tab set into a plaintext file so that I could track history, back it up, and retrieve them later by other means, e.g. ssh into my server from phone to retrieve a link (very high overhead). This doesn't scale too well when you want to mark an item as completed as removing a line of text in a file manually in a shell session from your phone isn't exactly "fluid".
My plan is to build a service that will be a storage backend to store feeds/queues of "things I need to do", whether it's articles I've been meaning to read or just simple TODO notes like "do xyz tonight". There will be a system to label/tag items under a specific category so that in the UI you're not just bombarded with a list of thousands of TODOs.
Features I've been considering having:
* allow user to specify multiple cloud storage backends for the data to be replicated across * have relatively simple storage format, motivation being that I should be able to view/modify data through plaintext interface like editing a file with vim if I want to * create firefox plugin that will use this same system to synchronize tabs, this would mean that as a side effect I would have this information available on all my systems and backed up as well * web UI to access all generic queues, e.g. items I've manually created as well as the queues storing my tabs
Sometimes I wonder if there's a term associated with how obsessive I am about not losing information...
I also wrote some AppleScript code to move open tab sessions back and forth between Safari and Chrome [1]. You also might be interested in some of the alternatives listed in the readme, like OneTab.
[1]: https://github.com/tedmiston/tab-transporter
I use Pocket for short-term "I want to come back to this soon" bookmarking, but I use Pinboard for long-term saving of stuff I might want to refer to later, thanks to tagging and its page archival feature.
I have written a CLI-based bookmark manager. It's pretty simple to use, you can add links, remove them, add titles for them, descriptions etc... Everything is organized with tags so you can specify which tag you want to get links from and it will show them to you. Oh and everything's saved in a plain text file so you can backup that file, use version control and whatever you want to do with it.
I will also add searching in the future but have not come around to do it since I haven't had much time. If you or anyone wants to help it's on Github and it's written in Go. Pull requests are welcome :)
https://github.com/Endi1/drawer
As for the Pinboard sync: not really. Since I made this mainly for myself and for personal use and since I don't use Pinboard I never thought of adding it. But it does seem interesting, maybe in the future.
I use Pinboard with searchable descriptions and tags to create a better organizational system. There are third party clients for mobile as well.
For some bookmarks like places to visit, I've adopted a hierarchical tag system within that.
And, with the browser plugin, any google search also returns results from Evernote, which is good because if I thought it worthwhile to clip the page in the past, it was probably a good one.
I currently have about 2000 articles on Pocket, and just tagging + simple search works for me.
I have this exact same problem.. so many links and no good way to organize them. My previous solution was a simple markdown file that I would add my links to and then generate an html page served through my website. But this got really cumbersome. I wanted something easier to manage/edit, so I made this.
Is anyone interested in trying this out? If so, check out my profile contact info and I'd be happy to discuss it :) I'm very close to having the mvp complete, and it would be nice to get some feedback before opening it up to the public more.
[1]: http://i.imgur.com/LKSQuT4.png
https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/
Demo:
http://skx.github.io/bookmarks.public/
New bookmarks are just appended to a data-file, and jQuery/javascript magic makes it easy to discover things. I store my own bookmarks in a git-repository so I can clone to ~/Repos/personal/bookmarks/ on each of my systems.
Great job on your app though, it's very functional and much better than other bookmarking solutions I've seen.
1. The data format is clean and open. At some point if the app becomes unavailable for whatever reason, I can write my own to retrieve my data. Or someone will.
2. There's an unofficial app for Android called "quaver". It's not very polished, but when linked with a folder synced to Google drive, it allows me to access/edit my notes on mobile.
3. Search is pretty good. You can tag stuff, arrange by folders, and search.
4. It can store attachments.
5. Sometimes if I think I need an offline version of a page, I just do a copy-paste and save it in quiver. Or sometimes I just save the page as PDF and add it to quiver.
Astonishingly, there's no search and replace. Like.. at all.
Incredibly frustrating because it's such an incredible app otherwise.
This tool also supports synchronizing your GitHub stars. So, you can track updates from projects that you starred on GitHub. If you want to bookmark something automatically, Larder extension is available for browsers, Android, and API.
I have been using Evernote. I just clip a website or PDF that I want to read later. But, I don't know why I can't use it properly. Like what you said, the problem is me. I haven't used Pinboard before. It seems many people recommend it a lot.
This larder thing looks interesting but to avoid drowning in tools might have to bookmark it for later and hopefully will stumble on it again. Trello can also work for bookmarks if you're doing research on a defined topic I've found but for general bookmarking i tried it does not scale well so it's perfect for projects and perfect for saving some results of some searches focused on that project.
I think using Pocket (mentioned in comments, not by you) solves a different problem than browser bookmarks, for example. Describing your desires may help the community describe (or build!) options.
I also fired up Feedly account as that's helpful too and I'd sort of forgotten about my account.
I'm thinking of testing out some more things as it seems like maybe there should be one more piece of the puzzle. Maybe that'll be pocket though I don't even remember what the interface is like or why I don't use it. Maybe no good reason at all.
* So I think Pinboard does a great job at the bookmark problem but either I'm just not used to it yet or it's not quite got the "read for later" problem solved.
* It seems as though pocket might be stronger at addressing the "read for later" problem. But now that I know the missing piece is called "read for later" it's just a matter of inserting that component into my personal app ecosystem and being more alert for those solutions as pinboard seems to nail the bookmark problem.
HN and citizens thereof: you rule! Like my bookmarks, I forget all about HN but always feel it's a good experience to visit here, maybe discuss a few things, occasionally post a question or something.