Show HN: Linkidex – save and sort the URLs you care about (linkidex.com)
I built Linkidex because I was getting overwhelmed by the number of things I had to keep track of on the internet during my day to day job. Constantly needing to re-find various wikis or jira epics or project proposals or whatever was eating into my day. I was using a chrome extension to manage urls, but the extension was getting unwieldy as my list of “important URLs” grew and I started looking for alternatives. There are a few really cool bookmark managers out there, but I wasn’t satisfied with what I saw. Regular bookmarks don’t cut it either for me as I need something that works across browsers and devices. Thus, Linkidex was born.
The most basic idea with Linkidex is that you can go to Linkidex and just start typing. Linkidex will search across your link titles, link urls, categories, and tags all at once. Click the result you are looking for and it opens in a new tab. If you want to scope your search by specific categories or tags you can do that too.
Linkidex is a progressive web application. It (mostly) works offline and it can be downloaded to your phone and act like a native app without requiring you to grant it any permissions. The back end is rails, and the front end is React, Typescript and GraphQL.
Security wise it is deployed to AWS. The database and back end are all wrapped up in a VPC. The front end supports 2 factor and WebAuthn, so you can use a yubikey or your device's fingerprint reader as your second factor.
Linkidex can import and export bookmarks to and from your favorite browser. That said, I’ve limited the number of links / categories / tags a given user can have for now on Linkidex to prevent anything insane from happening.
All feedback / feature requests / complaints / whatever welcome. Thanks for checking out Linkidex!
54 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 49.1 ms ] threadAs a side note: 1)which are the differences between pocket? 2) do you have a smartphone app on your road map?
Great job! Gonna test it!
1) I think the biggest difference is that Pocket (and some other competitors) try to keep you inside pocket. You can get to the original URL of something in your list, but it takes an extra step each time. Linkidex doesn’t try to keep you inside Linkidex, we just try to help you find the thing you are looking for as quickly as possible so you can move on.
2) Yep! Our roadmap includes browser extensions and native phone applications.
My bad.
May I ask what made you choose notion vs any alternative? Do you like having complete control over the shape of your data, do you like the UI, or is there something else about it?
I think the main features that led me to choose Notion were:
- Fully cross-platform (web, desktop, mobile)
- Browser extension (PC & Mobile) to quickly save pages to any database
- Ability to create searchable databases with custom fields, tags, multiple views, and other advanced features
- Ability to easily move an item from one database to another, for example moving an article from “Reading List” to “Saved Articles”
- Every database entry is also a page, so an entry in “Saved Articles” can have notes or links to other similar articles
- Very easy to share a database or page, similar to Google Drive
Of course, it’s not without its problems. Because it’s so general-purpose, it can feel unfocused and clunky at times. There are also concerns with having so much data in one tool, and it took a while to get everything set up. But being able to use the same tool to bookmark an interesting article to read later, do my finances, and find a favorite recipe for dinner has been a great experience.
It is of course fully possible that there’s a better alternative that I’ve missed, but it’s served me well so far.
May I ask what made you decide to use Shiori instead of pocket or something else? It looks like Shiori is marketed as a "simple clone of pocket."
No way to fix ugly favicons though. Name of of domain can still be used as well.
the first UI I built with Linkidex was a grid instead of rows. I moved to rows because the grid became tedious for users to parse when they began to search or filter and grid elements started shuffling.
Linkidex does not currently get a sites Favicons, and currently doesn't have a way to fix where a given Link is on the page. I have catalogued this feedback thank you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25886218a
For example, if I have a webpage "www.linkidex.com/test" which displays a bunch of text, including "HackerNews2022", you need the ability to find this link by searching for `HackerNews2022`, assuming that you haven't named the link `HackerNews2022` or tagged it or categorized it as such?
Some of our competitors have this feature, but this feature comes at a cost. What happens if the given page you have saved changes? What if you save a page "New Laptop setup instructions" and those instructions change? It may be harmful to follow laptop setup instructions that are out of date.
It's ok if bookmarked pages change. It's no different from a normal search engine, you just reduce the scope of a search from the whole internet to some private curated collection. Google CSE is good for that, one just need to write an interface to update it with bookmarked links...
Also I have a severe fear of link rot. I developed the habit of putting every link I would bookmark into web.archive.org and archive.is as well. So a nice tool should do that too (and of course store the generated link). Some folks might even would want to have it stored offline.
What I really want/need is a tool that helps auto-categorize/group all my open tabs into areas of interest and enables full-text search across all of those pages so that I can context switch back into whatever I was working on at that time.
Manually bookmarking and tagging doesn't scale for me.
Regarding auto-categorize, how would you want that to work? I imagine this could be a machine learning problem, but I wonder if there is a naive solution that solves most of the problem instead of just throwing ML at it?
Text search across pages has come up multiple times in this thread. I shall add it to our list of features to investigate.
I'm not always in favor of ML but I'd think this would be something ML would excel in.
That way, you could also feed the info from all those pages into software, let alone an AI for instance.
I see one import failed due to something on my side. I've identified the issue and have a fix, I'll follow up as soon as its deployed. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Looks good.
Also how’d you manage making it mobile friendly? That because it’s a progressive web app?
We are using Material UI (https://mui.com/material-ui/getting-started/overview/) on the front end which is what makes the website responsive and mobile friendly. MUI has been great to work with, I highly recommend it.
The Progressive Web App part of things (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web...) is what makes Linkidex still mostly work if your internet goes down, and lets users "download" the front end web application to their phone so it behaves like a native mobile app would. For example, users who download Linkidex get an icon on their home screen that opens Linkidex, and the url bar isn't visible when the app is open, despite the downloaded app just being a web page thats opened with your phone's default browser.
How is it you can use postgresql as database but your app still works offline? Been looking for a bookmarking app that works offline so that sounds cool
This isn't how Linkidex works right now, but using Linkidex as an example, the front end could queue up tasks such as "create link abc", "delete link "bcd", and "edit link cde" when offline. Then when your device regains an internet connection, it could send all of its queued up tasks to the back end and reconcile the changes with the database. PWAs make this kind of thing possible, and fairly simple to implement.
I am a huge fan of "The net ninja" on YouTube, and he has a great tutorial on PWAs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XT23X0Fjfk Note this is 3 years old and front end stuff changes quickly so this may be slightly out of date, but I still recommend this video series. PWAs are awesome.
Edit:
To clarify about linkidex working offline, you can still search your links when offline, assuming you loaded your links before going offline. You can't create, edit, or delete anything though, and if you refresh the app it will fail to reload just like any other web page. Maybe its unfair for me to say it 'mostly' works offline. I'll do a better job communicating this in the future.
https://raindrop.io/
Our roadmap is going to bring us in a different direction than Raindrop, but more details on that later.
2. I think automated generation of favicon + maindomain + <title></title> + opengraph card from the raw URL is quite useful, instead of manually adding the title.
3. Follow somebody's account. "Upvote" someone's link. (Yet another reddit/HN clone)
2) That is a great idea. Right now we default the title to the URL if a user doesn't input a title. Your suggestion is superior, will look into this.
3) This is something we have considered, but isn't currently on our road map. Right now we are looking at making Linkidex a great productivity tool as opposed to yet another social network.