Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

This is actually the reason why I stated a newsletter (weeklyrobotics.com). I was finding things on the Internet that were interesting, but then I could never find them again. I discovered that limiting search to my own domain made it much easier.

I’m using raindrop.io to save all the bookmarks in one place, and then while working on them I go through the top of the unsorted bookmarks, and select the ones I will feature in the newsletter.

This still doesn’t solve the problem of heaps of unsorted links (over 1.4k after around 3 years).

If I was to do something that you describe, I would probably look into dedicating some time into organizing your bookmarks, and if taking it to the next level then I would consider using TriliumNotes for making notes and categorizing the knowledge.

I use the Google Keep browser extension.

When I click on the extension's icon (or right-click > Save to Keep), a draft note pops up with the page link in the body of the note, as well as any text selected on the page prior to clicking the icon.

From there I can add more text to the body, insert a title, and add or select a tag. Once the note is in Keep more features are available, such as attaching an image or archiving the note to move it out of the way. And the note is accessible and searchable from any device.

One solution is to continuously record web history and then just search it. The advantage is:

1. you often don't know what resources you will really "value" in the future, so no more "to save or not to save, this is the question"

2. tagging, to be effective, requires discipline (thinking about then sticking to an agile system). So, we just replace it with search, preferably NLP/AI (so you don't have to remember the exact keywords)

Apps do exist, from the expensive [1] to the experimental [2].

[1] https://heyday.xyz/

[2] https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia

I use a system of personal knowledge management (PKM), which I've posted about before:

1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.

2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.

3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.

Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302365

I save everything I consider useful as an MHTML file (HTML/CSS/images in one file), which is native to Chromium browsers. This has the benefit of the page not being split into separate files as the normal save page does, doesn't break when the file is renamed like the normal save page does (on Windows at least), removes the need for bookmarks which go dead over time, preserves the original source URL in the file for later reference.

There are over 10k of such files I've saved in this manner. With practice it becomes second nature to categorize and tag them just using the filename, which makes them findable within seconds.

These have become like my own private search engine, without the issue of not being able to find answers to queries you know exist (which increasingly has become an issue with online search engines).

In Chromium the saving to MHTML feature is enabled by launching the browser with the CLI argument `--save-page-as-mhtml` (Vivaldi browser enables this by default without any arguments needed). Firefox used to support it via excellent addons up until their Quantum update but they haven't supported it since and is a dealbreaker to my daily use of it.

I used to think like that, stored everything in Pinboard, tagged properly. I also used to use nvalt (https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) for that as it had good search and I didn't have to switch to other tabs to search Pinboard.

It felt good to "catalog" all this knowledge but in reality I never went back to it, just like bookmarks and I realized that if something is important enough I'll always be able to re-find or re-download almost everything I ever found.

Not feeling like you have to catalog and store everything in personal knowledge management apps is very liberating.

That was the goal of the Memex proposed back in 1945, still unrealized. 8(

I take structured notes with Obsidian, then add a backlink to the resource. No bookmarking anymore because there's a probability of exactly 0% that I ever click on bookmarked resource again. Google indexes content, so you should index your own with obsidian and add semantic research on top.

I take notes in Joplin in general and also use the Joplin web clipper [1] to make sure that I have all the interesting articles I read or want to read in markdown

[1] https://joplinapp.org/clipper

I wrote a small app to scan my comments and stories on hacker news. It would dump them into a postgres database and use the full text search to normalize the text of the articles to make for easy searching at a later date when I inevitably would think “where did I read that thing about this?”

Sometimes I'll spend 15 minutes going through my (unordered) bookmarks and put them into folders, in the context of the things I'm working on. Some also get deleted.

There's a higher likelihood of them being deleted if they can't fit into a folder shared by other bookmarks.

I run into the same issue you do, and I just paste interesting links into Apple’s notes app since it’s convenient to use across my devices.

Personally I’ve found it useful to just scroll through it time to time to refresh my memory on what I’ve read/watched/listened to.

Maybe not the most ideal or fancy solution, but it works well for me, even as my note has gotten longer and longer.

I see others have already mentioned software I use for categorisation, i.e. Google Keep, Obsidian. If you like bookmarks and/or you want to organize and tag yours, I've recently found raindrop.io

Normally I use this one https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/pxlet-book... After installing it, when you browse a webpage, you can right click and find the bookmark option on the menu.

In Linux you can use xsel to grab the url and put it in a tagger using one shortcut, then add tags or comments.

As you can see, the harder part is using what you have tagged. If you have a custom menu that you do searches with, it can show matches, and if you keep a history of searches then more frequently used links can be seen first.

You can do all sorts of things with tag hierarchies and other stuff that a browser won't do, so tagging is often saner than thinking of how to make hierarchies using folders in a browser.

My personal solution to this is YAGNI. In very rare situations I visit chrome://history and search, if it is only a couple of days old.

But I do sorta like the idea you hint at, of a 1 click "add to my web" with its own personal webcrawler. I'd give it a try.

I use a self hosted instance of the Shaarli bookmark manager : https://shaarli.readthedocs.io/en/master/

I run an instance of yacy (in non-distributed Robinson mode). Any interesting links I add to my index (with a crawl depth of 0 since I only want that page, not the whole site).

This gives me a good search history, plus it automatically creates a cache of the page!

I've never done something like that, but after reading your post and the comments, I'm tempted to start doing so!

I'm thinking about a script that receives the URL and saves its main content (e.g., using Mozilla's Readability) in a text file. It also stores the URL on the first line and maybe sends a request to Archive.org to take a snapshot of the page and adds its URL to the second line in the file. Then, whenever I need something, I can search the content of those files (I use the Silver Searcher) and find what I'm looking for. If the main content stored in the file is not enough, I can open the original URL or the Archive's snapshot.

I think I won't need to categorize or tag them; searching seems enough to me.

The only difficulty I can think of is that extracting the main content of pages is not easy, and, for example, Mozilla's Readability doesn't work well all the time. It may be required to have a manual process for copying and pasting the data.

I created a section on my website for shower thoughts and link reminders. I'm building it as I go and as I require new features. So far it's a title/desc+tags that I can search and filter. I'm planning to add a random reminder every day and some sort of "check back in X months/years if what I predict happen to be true". I can't remember the name of the addon I had to create bookmarks in the 2000's with tags rather than folder and but it was the best organization tool I ever had (as a very disorganized person), trying to recreate what I remember from it.

Browser bookmarks with Netscape Bookmarks format (yuck!) for transferring between browsers when I access stuff regularly and don't want to discover it through the search engine every time. Self-hosted shortener service when I need to access URLs from any device in any location. So called "url files" which browser opens for me with every URL in a separate tab when there is temporary high volume inflow of URLs, e.g. researching a purchase, rental, or travel.

I keep everything in Evernote. The clipper is so good that I only have to clip the part of the page I care about, whether it's comments or pictures or whole article. It has fantastic search function with OCR.

I have about 5,000 notes in Evernote. I haven't found a good alternative so far.

I use Pocket[1] for this. There’s a browser extension and an iOS app; both are optimized for saving quickly. Later, I tag each item for easier search.

[1] https://getpocket.com/en/