Ask HN: Do you curate links/bookmarks?
Would like to know how the tech community deals with bookmarks and links. They might just be read-later entries that you want to visit later on. Or could the links you have been collecting be a valuable resource? How would you share them?
68 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] thread0: https://getpocket.com/
apologies for site not being done yet and article not fully fleshed out. but the topic has come back many times now that i think i needed to share what i thought about it.
to answer your question: we need to share and distribute our bookmarks in GitHub. it works for developers because our search queries are keyword-based.
pocket, pinboard.in, etc. don't work because they feel like "todo" lists.
Maybe add a 'ril' tag for every thing you want to read later, no tags for generic queue of things to look at, 'archive' for things you want to keep, etc.
This makes them easy to find again at any later time due to mediawiki's excellent built-in search facilities.
Bookmark wise I mostly just use the standard bookmark manager. I have considered a self-hosted syncing mechanism but I only have a few hundred bookmarks, it is stuff I use.
The challenging bit is providing a sound enough structure so every item finds a place almost organically. If it’s a simple list then it can take a while to find a specific entry and if it’s too categorised you’ll run into a similar problem. I like to use trees with symlinks.
Worth a try I would say, but I won't make a definitive recommendation for now.
The Alfred workflow makes capture and tagging pretty seemless.
Edit: just read the op properly, not after pinboard. I also would like a visual manager mainly for design refs. I don’t personally use it but Are.na is a cool platform for visual bookmarking of media alongside articles / sites.
Articles I plan to read later are saved in Pocket and archived after I read them.
What I'm doing now instead, is curating a set of links around some topics, and sharing them publicly. The most portable way of storing and presenting them is either an HTML page on one of my websites or a markdown file mirrored to Github. That way I can be sure that my data isn't locked into some proprietary format by an entity who might get Incredible Journey-ed for whatever reasons.
Here are my personal favorites: https://jmstfv.com/bookmarks
And here's the curated list of businesses publicly sharing their expenses: https://github.com/jmstfv/open-expenses
It's a primary reason I continue to run my big fat mouth on blogs the rest of the world largely seems to have a yawning disinterest in most of the time.
On a page that I think may be useful I click a menu item in firefox which activates org-protocol sending the URL to an Emacs server, starting Emacs if needed. Emacs prompts me for some tags and then makes an entry in an org file which I sync to all my computers, home and work, via syncthing. I'll then either simply close the Emacs frame or if appropriate leave it open while I read through the page and add notes to the org entry. Later, if I have reason to revisit then I'll search on terms my brain is able to associate and that hits on the tags, text or page title that were stored.
Scripts and configuration are propagated to different computers using Git via a personal Gitea instance and vcsh/myrepo tools.
I have made 95%(2000+) of my bookmarks public on GitHub[0]. I have categorized them and host them on a public repository(110+ forks, ~1800 stars) and push every week. I have also made the entire repo available as a GitBook with search and export as PDF functionality.
[0] https://github.com/rsapkf/goodies
Search (especially incremental) is very important, there's no way I'm going to read through someone else's 2000+ bookmarks, whereas searching for topics that interest me is feasible.
Wondering why you publish both gitbook and mdbook? I was planning to use mdbook to release my bookmarks to public; gitbook development has stalled as far as I understand.
If something is interesting enough to keep I clip in into Evernote and tag it, then I can be confident it will be there when I go looking for it at some undefined point in the future.
I capture a lot of bookmarks into my org-mode and I don't spend much time deliberately curating. Once in few weeks I go through captured bookmarks and quickly assign a priority to each one (just a matter of pressing hotkey). Then I sort everything by priority, typically ending up with 10-15 higher priority ones that I would tag, put into my reading queue, refile etc.
Rest of it isn't curated and serves as my personal search engine [0]. Often instead of searching in google I'd first search in my emacs and find some relevant information in my knowledge base.
In addition, I'm working on promnesia [1], a browser addon that integrates links in my org-mode files with my browser. E.g. - when I visit some blog, it would show me that I've got few blog posts from that blog bookmarked (along with my private notes and annotations), which typically means that the blog is worth exploring more - when I visit someone's twitter profile it might prompt that I've retweeted/favorited some of that person's tweets
[0] https://beepb00p.xyz/pkm-search.html#personal_information
[1] https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia#demo
I use browser bookmark folders only for links for private stuff e.g. fun+memes, cooking, curated lists of <FOO>, ... Also I maintain markdown files for documenting changes/tweaks and modifications made to various machines on my network.
As a VI user I never looked at org-mode before. I'll probably do so in 2020 (https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode).