Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

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.

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.

pinboard.in

It's great (again).

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

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.

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

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...

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.

> 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.

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.

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...

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

Hope it serves you well

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 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 !

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.

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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