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Ask HN: Do you bookmark or collect content?

12 points by AshMokhberi ↗ HN
I'm working on an app that's essentially a tool for bookmarking content. We only have a small user base and to take the app where I wanted to go I need to do a lot of work re-writing it. Before I invest more time I wanted to get some ideas of how many people use bookmarks in any form and how.

So what apps/tools/process do you use for bookmarking content and what would you improve ?

If you don't bookmark why not ? Is it a lack of good tools or you just don't have any desire to ?

25 comments

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kaoD
Yes, I do, in my browser bookmarks... but I never come back. I just hoard bookmarks and then sweep and prune whole folders from time to time.

The amount of information I'm interested in is such that the time needed to understand it is >>>> my lifetime.

Unfortunately a tool won't help.

AshMokhberi
That's a very interesting perspective are you mainly using bookmarks for very important content? Do you ever just want somewhere to put stuff temporarily as you're browsing?
kaoD
Okay, here's my workflow:

When I'm interested in something (e.g. cryptography) I open a bunch of tabs with usual suspects (google for cryptography, crypto stack exchange, google for crypto books...) and crawl these for even more tabs. Once I get a broad base of subjects to learn from, I slowly read these tabs and perhaps open more from these.

More often than not, I run out of time, so I have to temporarily store these tabs. I use my browser bookmarks for this.

My real bookmarks (real as in "the way bookmarks are intended to be used") are just in the bookmarks toolbar instead of hidden in bookmark folders.

I don't store important stuff in bookmarks. Bookmarks are not important. Important stuff is left as an open tabs to be reviewed ASAP.

AshMokhberi
That's interesting. It's very much what I assumed we use tabs to store the temporary stuff that we need right now or in the very short term. Bookmarks are not a solution engineered towards this very temporary way of working. However tabs are not the ideal solution either they are just a work around. I often find I want a convenient and temporary place to put this short lived content and it should disappear when I stop using it. What do you think ?
scousetech
Yes got loads of bookmarks, use Chrome because of the sync facility. Can add/remove bookmarks & they're synced between mobile devices & laptops.
AshMokhberi
Thanks for your response, I agree sync is an awesome feature. Is there anything you would like to improve about the process of bookmarking ?
RubberSoul
I've always thought it would be nice to have bookmarks that either self destruct or pop-up as a reminder some specified time in the future. For example, I just read an article about creating a bootable USB copy of OS X Mavericks. I bookmarked it as a reminder for when Mavericks comes out. That's a bookmark I'm going to need exactly once in the future and that should be destroyed as soon as I act on it.
AshMokhberi
That's a very interesting use case and I can see how that would be valuable. I share a similar thought on bookmarks as in right now they are very permanent things when what I really want is like a temporary scrapboard that automatically disappears when I stop adding stuff to it. What do you think would that be useful ?
frou_dh
In recent years, I have preferred "read it later" services to traditional bookmarks. I delete items once I've read them (rather than building up an archive), and have went from Instapaper to Pocket to Apple's Reading List, each of which was an upgrade in UX.

That leaves traditional bookmarks mainly for select "reference" resources like API documentation.

For whatever reason, I have a strong dislike of "junk drawers", even when they are digital, and like getting rid of things.

AshMokhberi
So do you think that's what's more important it's not that bookmarks are wrong it's that the UX is terrible ? Or is that reading stuff later is actually what you want to do most of the time with bookmarks ?
frou_dh
I think I'm just a neurotic "anti-hoarder" and it extends in to the digital realm. A lot of stuff gets deleted instead of archived in Gmail, too.

It's probably not worth taking much notice of this particular mindset.

AshMokhberi
I think the opposite you're exactly the person worth paying attention to :)

I think most people like the idea of being "free" from hoarding. because it clutters the mind. I guess the thing with bookmarks is that they need to disappear after either an action or a certain amount of time has passed since they where last used/created.

I'm also wondering how this works visually. I often find if things are just messy then I hate it and feel like I'm cluttered. But if something is kept clean and structured then I'm happy for it to stay as long as it gets out of my way when I don't need it.

I'm wondering if bookmarks are the same. If I don't need you disappear. But when I want to get it back then I want to find it in a clean and organised way.

The problem is I don't want to invest anytime in the process of managing the clutter. I want to manage itself.

What do you think ?

frou_dh
Yes, that sounds reasonable.

Another commenter mentions going on a bookmarking spree when investigating a specific topic. Helping classify and process the results of those sprees seems like it would be helpful.

IMO a lot of other uses of traditional bookmarks range from pointless (I can instead easily type/auto-complete my favourite domains) to better served by specialist apps (news aggregator sites + caching read it later apps being a great example).

doubt_me
I have over 2000 bookmarks. Simply organized by folder on my chrome browser.

There are a few solid good bookmarking apps but they all for the most part lack the option to import bookmarks/ also don't really have clean usable UX. The ones I am talking about are mostly for making bookmarks a social thing like pinterest

some of them are part of my Freeware Index project

https://github.com/Doubtme/FreeWare_Index

The rest are for my website index which has 17 main categories and 40+ sub categories spread out. I haven't made the website index public yet but I intend to once I organize it. I will probably end up deleting a few hundred links once I get to it

a3n
Here's one thing I hate about bookmarks. They aren't. Bookmarks. They don't keep your place in the middle of a long work. They only, and always, point to the beginning of a work, not inside it, unless the author has made internal anchors and exposes them.

I'd like bookmarks to be bookmarks.

I'd also like bookmarks to keep track of what they have pointed to. So a bookmark might show you that it has pointed to paragraphs 10, 22, 39, and the current 44. Cause it'd be nice to be able to go back to paragraph 22 as a reference.

And a bookmark should have notes. Firefox bookmarks have properties/notes accessible on right-click; I imagine clever people could expand that.

Heck, why not make them queryable by sql?

a3n
I have finally found a workflow that works for me, and I'm slowly converting my thousands of unusable bookmarks (I'm a hoarder).

I use pinboard (delicio.us clone) and firefox.

pinboard lets you tag a bookmark, and you can subscribe to a tag's rss feed, or a combination of tags' feed. It's pretty clever.

firefox has a "live bookmark" feature, where a bookmark is really an rss reader of a specific feed. Peanut butter in my chocolate.

So for news sites, I tag them in pinboard as 'news'. For news sites that I want to read daily, they get an additional 'daily' tag. For news sites that I read frequently but not daily, they get the addtional 'often' tag. That's all in pinboard. I use a firefox extension to save pinboard bookmarks.

In firefox I have a bookmarks folder called news. Inside the news bookmark folder I have three live bookmarks, each pointing to one of my pinboard rss feeds:

  news #firefox folder
    news # firefox live bookmark pointing to pinboard 'news' rss feed
    news daily # pinboard feed for combo of 'news' and 'daily' tags
    news often # combo of 'news' and 'often' tags
In firefox I click on Bookmarks/news/news often, and I see the list of all pinboard bookmarks that have been tagged with both 'news' and 'often'.

And since it's pinboard I can access them from anywhere, any browser, no synchronization required.

Now I actually use my bookmarks.

a3n
More firefox and pinboard bookmark management.

The firefox pinboard extension (and probably other browsers' pinboard extensions if they exist) lets you "Save tab set". So if you want to save a huge set of open tabs (guilty) and change focus, do that and give the set a name.

You can then, later, come back to the tab set. You can open them all back into tabs, or edit the list, or open one tab at a time. I wish you could attach tabs to bookmarks in a tab list, but it's not too bad to have to open a single mark/tab and then tag it.

a3n
And, to manage lots of open tabs strictly in firefox, use tab groups: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tab...

Basically you can divide your open tabs into groups, and then only have one group open at a time. You can easily switch between groups. That way I can switch focus between different subjects that I'm studying.

Unfortunately pinboard can't see firefox tab groups, it only sees all the tabs in all the groups. It would be nice to use pinboard to "save all tabs" for just the currently opened firefox tab group. Maybe some day.

_random_
Chrome: well-known provider and is available without third-party installations. The latter will either fail or be acquired and shut down anyway.
stevekemp
I store my bookmarks under revision control, as a single HTML file. The file has some jQuery magic to allow tagging and filtering, and there's an online demo linked to from the repository:

https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/

(I have my own bookmarks in a private repository. Which allows me to sync to N-machines.)

radisb
I use Chrome and pin the tabs I definitely dont want to lose but I cant read right now. They stay there forever and dont take space. If they start piling up and do take space, I am forced to take out some and keep the really useful ones. Those that survive this iterative process for a long time go into the bookmarks.
mcintyre1994
I don't bookmark in browser because I use lots of devices and don't want to be tied to one browser. If I find something I want to read, on whatever device, I send it to Pocket. If I want to keep it longterm, I star it and IFTTT sends it to an Evernote notebook for me. It works great for me, and if you want to know the one feature that would stop me ever swapping Pocket for your service, it'd be if you lacked IFTTT integration.

So really, I see the read-it-later service as the logical, device-agnostic development of bookmarks. That's not to say they can't be improved, but I don't have a suggestion offhand that hasn't been posted yet.