For my 80k+ bookmarks I use buku.
Everything goes in there. It`s just a sqlite database (and buku is also a library for python). Good resources are saved in archivebox.io and are searchable via `rga`.
In order to access my bookmarks i either need a local copy or have access to where my stuff is stored.
To open any bookmark i search with `fzf` outside the browser. so i can work browser independently. (Can be integrated in rofi or dmenu.)
And in the near future I`ll upload resources in a webarchive format to ipfs node to preserve some of the current internet (and to not get involved with rate limiting when I update my buku metadata. Sorry HN, I'm not spamming, just updating meta data for my bookmark archive.)
Just to represent the other end of the spectrum: me (43 years old, been hacking since I learned C64 assembly at age 10), who has 38 bookmarks and I don't think I've ever had more than 10 tabs open in my entire life.
How is this as a privacy oriented solution? Using in-browser bookmarks is, in my opinion, like creating a perfect fingerprint of who you are in so many ways (aside from the obvious of being traceable based on the same bookmarks being transferred to new browsers). Any suggestions?
I keep making bookmarks, but I don't know why... I never, ever, ever, ever go back and use them. I even think about how I'm not going to use a bookmark as I create it. :-\
I tend to keep way too many tabs open in my browsers, some of which I never, ever go back and read. Once in a while I dump these evergreen tabs into bookmarks.google.com (yeah, I know), which is just enough to satisfy my inner hoarder that I haven't completely lost whatever was so special about that tab.
I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.
I recently created a daily "random 5 bookmarks" email using GitHub actions and Pinboard's API. I love it; it's a serendipitous reminder of things I once thought were interesting, and now I bookmark things with abandon just so they may show up again. I rarely use bookmarks to find something again because search is still low-friction, but that assumes I know what I'm looking for.
There's a real point here -- not every thing we note will ever have value to us again.
OTOH, I taught high school math briefly, and this reminds me of the evergreen question "When are we ever going to use this?" And the honest answer that most students in the classroom will never use more than a tiny portion of the anything they're taught beyond basic algebra (maybe not even that).
And yet it's worth doing sometimes because at any given point in life, you don't know exactly what you're going to be or do later. You want to do what is more likely to open doors than close doors later.
Even if you learn your HS math well, you probably won't get by on that skill specifically. You'll either train on deeper specifics that HS math gatekept... and/or you'll probably forget enough of it that you'd have to come back and brush up and then get into specific applications.
But you'll remember there was such a thing as this kind of problem solving and have some idea of what it entailed and where to find out more.
It has become more important to me as search has deteriorated in general. If I find a possibly useful site that isn't SEO-compliant, there is a decent chance I might not be able to find it again if I don't save a link.
My bookmarks are roughly broken into two groups - a small set that I go to specifically on a regular basis, and a much larger set that's organized loosely into a long list of folders. I rarely go into my bookmark folders to click on one of these links specifically.
The value of that larger set of bookmarks is like a personalized search history. When I search for a topic, I really like knowing whether I've already visited a relevant site. It saves sifting through raw search results for topics that come up a few times a year, or when I work on specific kinds of projects.
I’ve spent more time trying to find a page I wish I’d bookmarked than bookmarking. The friction is so low adding a bookmark, even when I doubt I’ll need it.
Some time ago I went through my several hundred bookmarks, rooted out link rot, and tagged all of them. The tags have been a godsend for finding high quality resources quickly. Recently I needed materials on C and systems programming and I found the perfect site bookmarked who knows when. My bookmarks are more of a very niche, manual high quality index for searching.
Right there with you. I have this vague dream that one day, the tech will be there to automatically collate and reference all my stored data more easily, sort of like how I work with physical sources.
Even as I type this, though, it feels more and more like a pipe dream.
Protip: switch to an outliner with infinite nesting like Dynalist and dump bookmarks in there. You can far more easily categorise, tag and interlink bookmarks that way, and it eventually evolves into a personal wiki almost.
I gave up, no use. Important work links I know how to find again (I always remember who I send links to on Slack and then I can find them very quickly).
I gave up on collecting links, I'm not organized enough, it always turns into an unusable mess.
I'm not using browser bookmarks anymore, instead I am just using plaintext files (org-mode in my case). When I want to make a bookmark I use grasp [0] to simply capture in in the 'links.org' file, possibly with some notes/selected text and tags. Now and then I would skim through this file, refile the most important/interesting things to other files, and put the rest into 'later.org' (things I might never look at again :) ). The upside is that bookmarks become alive this way, you can easily edit them, add more context, interlink, etc.
I also mirror saved items from other services (e.g. reddit/HN/twitter/instapaper) as plaintext org-mode files, via orger [1].
Then, all of this feeds into Promensia [0] [1], a tool I wrote that serves as a web browsing copilot and surfaces my bookmarks (or any relevant links, really) when I'm browsing.
That way I don't need to worry about spending too much time processing bookmarks and that I'd never read them, I can just read the most interesting stuff and the rest is searchable (so I use it as a knowledge base/personal search engine), and surfaces in my browser via Promnesia, so I can find out if I have some relevant information in my knowledge base without actively searching. I don't need to suffer from vendor lock-in (even if the service/tool is open, migration is always painful), I can just add another adapter to my system and feed it into Promnesia/Orger.
del.icio.us is still up, albeit with a "note secure" warning [0].
"""
My name is Maciej Ceglowski. I bought what remains of this site in 2017 for about the price of a Volkswagen. I got that money from running a paid clone of del.icio.us called Pinboard.
Both my delicious accounts are still accessible. I was away from the Internet for eight years (jail) and when I got out delicious was one of the only accounts that still worked, since it hadn't changed its authentication system while I was gone. Sadly, 99% of my bookmarks are dead links now.
Adjacent to what the author is doing, I manage my bookmarks in a web app. The main principle is that it should be possible to add any link, no matter how trivial, and have a good chance of finding it later on. (Eventually, in the far-off future, search-engine numbers of links.)
I have written a similar tool[0], also using the YAML format. The output is a small web app, contained in a single HTML file. We host our YAML project bookmarks in a Git repository and automatically deploy the generated web app, so it's available to the whole team. I do the same with all my private bookmarks.
Synchronizing bookmarks between browsers and endpoints is a surprisingly long standing and thorny issue within enterprise IT. You'd think it would be simple but every profile synchronization service I've ever encountered has had severe failure scenarios. I guess it makes sense when you think of it as a CAP theorem problem.
One solution kept the bookmarks in an internal DB and would create them on an endpoint (eg a non-persistent virtual desktop) at sign-in. Sometimes this failed due to whatever reason and you had no bookmarks for that session. Oh well.
But wait the solution also synced bookmarks when the browser process was closed. That sync didn't fail so now all your bookmarks were overwritten with a blank bookmarks file and were thus erased from the DB too! Now you got to call support and have them revert your bookmarks to the previous version. But thankfully the service eventually included a self-service portal where you could revert them yourself.
Heaven forbid you have two active endpoints. Last write wins? Maybe!
> every profile synchronization service I've ever encountered has had severe failure scenarios. I guess it makes sense when you think of it as a CAP theorem problem
I don't think CAP theorem is particularly relevant in this scenario. Sounds more like they were doing an overly basic "just overwrite with the current state" instead of sending individual commands, e.g. "create this bookmark".
The reason is likely a procurement problem. Anything that's "enterprise" and calls things "endpoints" is off to a bad start in my book.
With Pinboard down recently[0], I have made a pledge to myself to export from Pinboard.in as frequently as possible to a local hard-drive where I then back that up in several cloud locations for peace of mind. As a rule of thumb: I don't build my castles on other people's land. Edit: the cloud is building castles on other people's land, but I have local backups and don't put all my eggs in one basket (i.e use several providers like Backblaze, Dropbox etc).
I started using Notion to organize and keep track of my digital life, including storing all of my bookmarks. It's been great so far, I can categorize the bookmarks and add notes and comments on them to get the gist of the information that is at the linked site. Before having bookmarks sucked because I had to go to the link and re-read the site to remember why I bookmarked it. Now I just write down little snippets of important information from the site, and I can just reference that instead.
If I may shamelessly plug my startup: https://histre.com/ I'm building recommendations on top of your bookmarks / notes / highlights. This could be interesting because there is no conflict of interest in those recommendations (ie not trying push anything). It has a lot of integrations including with IFTTT and Twitter, with more coming.
I'm the author of this post and its been really cool to see all the different comments and projects looking to solve this problem - they all make mine look like amateur hour!
Much like other posts on here, todo apps and bookmarks don't really work for me either, they just get out of date. It's not really about personal bookmarks, it's more about trying to give people in a company a consistent experience and making onboarding a bit more self-service. I use this as a way to store my companies URLs, keep them centralised and stored in my browser. The Slackbot was then a way of making it accessible to non-technical users.
I had ideas about making a web app and other interfaces to update the YAML but I wanted to keep it simple, base it peoples existing toolchains and a GipOps approach for versioning. There are a bunch of other tools I want to build around onboarding and OOH support but I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested so all of this was really nice to read.
For years on I endured ads because they were the sole source of revenue to millions of sites online and to people who were getting peanuts for their efforts of building, maintaining and pouring contents which have been priceless to me. But the more I endured them, the further they were pushed down my throat, most of all youtube. So around 6 months ago I decided that I've had enough and switched to brave. And fundamentally the one thing which I still dearly miss was quick access to my bookmarks/history from any of my devices. History more so than bookmarks but hey... I might end up doing something similar specifically for history.
Bookmarks, gotta love something so simple that just never works for me. It's the same as todo list apps, I tried all of them, and non really stick (although Things3 is doing well atm). Things get outdated, I don't organize it well and it becomes a mess, or I simply stop using it. I think I'm just not organized enough.
But I really enjoy reading the comments how everyone has either build something themselves, uses some (sometimes obscure/niche) tool, or has bundled a bunch of stuff together into something that works for them. OP's solution also looks nice.
I was trying to do the exact same thing without git and coding (so that people could just view the bookmarks, maybe react to them as a voting mechanism). Ironically I ended up coding a solution for that - https://www.axomark.xyz .
The previous version was a free service without the need to sign up - just create a bookmark collection page with an optional password, then anyone with the password can use it right away. The link to the collection could be totally anonymous because the app tracked nothing at all. But I got 0 users, apart from myself. So I rewrote it from scratch to make the collections more organizable. The sharing is still anonymous because there's no way for another user to know who created them. There has to be a way, however to track your own bookmarks, so I guess it's not truly "anonymous" as in "impossible to track" (the database contains the bookmark owner). But it seemed this time around people are more interested. I guess there has to be a balance.
I actually do something similar, but no upvotes and it uses Evernote WebClipper to capture and track tags archive a snapshot of the page. They are then indexed by both tags and date and rendered into templates to be stored statically forever.
https://jaytaylor.com/notes (warning: all on one page, it's grown large over the years, please be gentle to my poor server)
It's open-source, just a python module you hook up an Evernote API key and tell it which "notebook" to use:
Really handy to not lose track of links and pages (though my system could definitely be further improved). I also like that it's naturally cross browser since the clipper plugin is available for both FF and Chrome.
Very cool! I've been playing with a side project (link below) to try and make bookmarks easier to search through, and have run up against the whole "normalizing bookmark data" challenge.
Most browsers do seem to follow a standard, but I've yet to find a way to sync them across browsers, devices and machines (without having to use some 3rd party service like Evernote, or what have you). I always prefer solutions/approaches that don't require users to change their behaviour (eg. use another service to track links).
With the forthcoming version manifest v3 for Chrome extensions, this may prove trickier, but it should in theory be possible :)
I've seen a few large tech companies where internal "bookmarks" where all just shortlinks you had to remember (using golinks.io or another internal config).
So for example http://go/project-X, go/JIRA-123, go/team, go/team/oncall. References to the links were scattered across dozens of documentation pages and you just got used to that state over time. I always thought that a proper bookmarking system would do wonders for onboarding and documentation (by forcing people to maintain organisation if they wanted to use the links).
I typically export my bookmarks as JSON from Firefox and use a custom script to loop through and convert each bookmark into HTML nodes. I use JavaScript to expand/hide nodes with buttons (styled with CSS). Overall pretty simple but really sustainable and easy to use IMO ... Pretty proud of it:
[+] [-] _fb63|4 years ago|reply
In order to access my bookmarks i either need a local copy or have access to where my stuff is stored. To open any bookmark i search with `fzf` outside the browser. so i can work browser independently. (Can be integrated in rofi or dmenu.)
And in the near future I`ll upload resources in a webarchive format to ipfs node to preserve some of the current internet (and to not get involved with rate limiting when I update my buku metadata. Sorry HN, I'm not spamming, just updating meta data for my bookmark archive.)
https://github.com/jarun/Buku
https://archivebox.io/
https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb
[edited1 for formatting] [edited2 forgot to relate to the linked article]
[+] [-] dmd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_a_g|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikisweeting|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helloworld11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaytaylor|4 years ago|reply
I've bookmarked your post for later ;), will have to go back and review in detail when time permits.
[+] [-] throwawaysea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inanutshellus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SloopJon|4 years ago|reply
I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.
[+] [-] mark_h|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wwweston|4 years ago|reply
OTOH, I taught high school math briefly, and this reminds me of the evergreen question "When are we ever going to use this?" And the honest answer that most students in the classroom will never use more than a tiny portion of the anything they're taught beyond basic algebra (maybe not even that).
And yet it's worth doing sometimes because at any given point in life, you don't know exactly what you're going to be or do later. You want to do what is more likely to open doors than close doors later.
Even if you learn your HS math well, you probably won't get by on that skill specifically. You'll either train on deeper specifics that HS math gatekept... and/or you'll probably forget enough of it that you'd have to come back and brush up and then get into specific applications.
But you'll remember there was such a thing as this kind of problem solving and have some idea of what it entailed and where to find out more.
Kindof like a bookmark.
[+] [-] LVB|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] japhyr|4 years ago|reply
The value of that larger set of bookmarks is like a personalized search history. When I search for a topic, I really like knowing whether I've already visited a relevant site. It saves sifting through raw search results for topics that come up a few times a year, or when I work on specific kinds of projects.
[+] [-] blowski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 63|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voltaireodactyl|4 years ago|reply
Even as I type this, though, it feels more and more like a pipe dream.
[+] [-] ajvs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeptualize|4 years ago|reply
I gave up on collecting links, I'm not organized enough, it always turns into an unusable mess.
[+] [-] basch|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] defaultchar|4 years ago|reply
https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...
[+] [-] MarcelOlsz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DelightOne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karlicoss|4 years ago|reply
I also mirror saved items from other services (e.g. reddit/HN/twitter/instapaper) as plaintext org-mode files, via orger [1].
Then, all of this feeds into Promensia [0] [1], a tool I wrote that serves as a web browsing copilot and surfaces my bookmarks (or any relevant links, really) when I'm browsing.
That way I don't need to worry about spending too much time processing bookmarks and that I'd never read them, I can just read the most interesting stuff and the rest is searchable (so I use it as a knowledge base/personal search engine), and surfaces in my browser via Promnesia, so I can find out if I have some relevant information in my knowledge base without actively searching. I don't need to suffer from vendor lock-in (even if the service/tool is open, migration is always painful), I can just add another adapter to my system and feed it into Promnesia/Orger.
[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp#readme
[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html
[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507
[+] [-] evo_9|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
What happened to Delicious: https://www.failory.com/cemetery/delicious
[+] [-] abetusk|4 years ago|reply
"""
My name is Maciej Ceglowski. I bought what remains of this site in 2017 for about the price of a Volkswagen. I got that money from running a paid clone of del.icio.us called Pinboard.
"""
[0] https://del.icio.us/help
[+] [-] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allochthon|4 years ago|reply
https://digraph.app/
https://github.com/emwalker/digraph/
[+] [-] darekkay|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/
[+] [-] dopylitty|4 years ago|reply
One solution kept the bookmarks in an internal DB and would create them on an endpoint (eg a non-persistent virtual desktop) at sign-in. Sometimes this failed due to whatever reason and you had no bookmarks for that session. Oh well.
But wait the solution also synced bookmarks when the browser process was closed. That sync didn't fail so now all your bookmarks were overwritten with a blank bookmarks file and were thus erased from the DB too! Now you got to call support and have them revert your bookmarks to the previous version. But thankfully the service eventually included a self-service portal where you could revert them yourself.
Heaven forbid you have two active endpoints. Last write wins? Maybe!
[+] [-] robertlagrant|4 years ago|reply
I don't think CAP theorem is particularly relevant in this scenario. Sounds more like they were doing an overly basic "just overwrite with the current state" instead of sending individual commands, e.g. "create this bookmark".
The reason is likely a procurement problem. Anything that's "enterprise" and calls things "endpoints" is off to a bad start in my book.
[+] [-] WallyFunk|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306
[+] [-] animal_spirits|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirubakaran|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thearegee|4 years ago|reply
Much like other posts on here, todo apps and bookmarks don't really work for me either, they just get out of date. It's not really about personal bookmarks, it's more about trying to give people in a company a consistent experience and making onboarding a bit more self-service. I use this as a way to store my companies URLs, keep them centralised and stored in my browser. The Slackbot was then a way of making it accessible to non-technical users.
I had ideas about making a web app and other interfaces to update the YAML but I wanted to keep it simple, base it peoples existing toolchains and a GipOps approach for versioning. There are a bunch of other tools I want to build around onboarding and OOH support but I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested so all of this was really nice to read.
Thank you
[+] [-] axegon_|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] basch|4 years ago|reply
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021218111-How...
[+] [-] wrycoder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d4rkp4ttern|4 years ago|reply
* tracks every web page you visit, saves full text * makes it searchable later
So when you think about, “what was the page I found on HN that was talking about xyz”, you can find it via a quick search. In theory, anyway.
I came across BrowserParrot doing something like this (I am not the author, just found it intriguing)
https://www.browserparrot.com/
HN discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28689734
[+] [-] codeptualize|4 years ago|reply
But I really enjoy reading the comments how everyone has either build something themselves, uses some (sometimes obscure/niche) tool, or has bundled a bunch of stuff together into something that works for them. OP's solution also looks nice.
[+] [-] isaaafc|4 years ago|reply
The previous version was a free service without the need to sign up - just create a bookmark collection page with an optional password, then anyone with the password can use it right away. The link to the collection could be totally anonymous because the app tracked nothing at all. But I got 0 users, apart from myself. So I rewrote it from scratch to make the collections more organizable. The sharing is still anonymous because there's no way for another user to know who created them. There has to be a way, however to track your own bookmarks, so I guess it's not truly "anonymous" as in "impossible to track" (the database contains the bookmark owner). But it seemed this time around people are more interested. I guess there has to be a balance.
[+] [-] jaytaylor|4 years ago|reply
https://jaytaylor.com/notes (warning: all on one page, it's grown large over the years, please be gentle to my poor server)
It's open-source, just a python module you hook up an Evernote API key and tell it which "notebook" to use:
https://github.com/jaytaylor/evernote-publisher
Really handy to not lose track of links and pages (though my system could definitely be further improved). I also like that it's naturally cross browser since the clipper plugin is available for both FF and Chrome.
AFAIK, I'm the only one using it :)
[+] [-] onassar|4 years ago|reply
Most browsers do seem to follow a standard, but I've yet to find a way to sync them across browsers, devices and machines (without having to use some 3rd party service like Evernote, or what have you). I always prefer solutions/approaches that don't require users to change their behaviour (eg. use another service to track links).
With the forthcoming version manifest v3 for Chrome extensions, this may prove trickier, but it should in theory be possible :)
Bookee: https://onassar.github.io/extensions/bookee/
[+] [-] rank0|4 years ago|reply
I have always wanted to self-host an instance of this app as I use several different desktop/mobile browsers.
[+] [-] phgn|4 years ago|reply
So for example http://go/project-X, go/JIRA-123, go/team, go/team/oncall. References to the links were scattered across dozens of documentation pages and you just got used to that state over time. I always thought that a proper bookmarking system would do wonders for onboarding and documentation (by forcing people to maintain organisation if they wanted to use the links).
[+] [-] l00sed|4 years ago|reply
https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/bookmarks
Eventually, I'd like to add "level" markers that give more info about number of levels contained or number of bookmarks therein.