Show HN: Free Plain-Text Bookmarking

[piterrro]

Yeeeears ago (around 2011/2012) I've built a simple bookmarking app called Miitla (MInd IT LAter), you can still find references to it[1]. I was focused on providing a simple bookmarking experience with tags and such. Unfortunately, I was not motivated enough to keep updating the project and in the end, I stopped. I got a few thousand users, but at the time my day job was generating nice income and I wasn't thinking about monetizing Miitla.

To this day, I regret that I did not pursue it and transformed into something bigger.

Congrats on the launch, what catches my attention is the simplicity. Keep it like this for long enough and you will get many users.

[1]http://ratemystartup.com/save-links-with-one-click-miitla-co...

[piterrro]

Here is an interesting plot twist. At the time, one of Miitla "competitors" was Kippt[1], I was impressed with their design at the time and followed them very carefully. Turns out, Kippt founder is Linear founder these days...

Persistence is the key.

[1]https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kippt

[justusthane]

Two thoughts:

- I like the no-nonsense landing page, but what I'd like more is to be able to see what the product actually looks like without having to sign up. At least screenshots, but a demo would be nice.

- I'm looking to migrate away from Pinboard, but I like how you can see all of a user's bookmarks (e.g: https://pinboard.in/u:justusthane) unless they mark them private. I get that the point of Webtag is it's private by default, but it would also be cool if this was an option.

[egonschiele]

Just curious, why are you planning to migrate away from Pinboard? I have been meaning to sign up for years.

[thinking_banana]

I'm curious, where and how is the information stored as part of the service. Would be nice if you can share the deployment strategy that is being used as it suggests the framework for long term support.

Thanks and nice work

[glacials]

I'm not the dev, but based on the source it looks like Mongo: https://github.com/vasanthv/webtag/blob/main/server/collecti...

[tandav]

It would be nice to have some sort of demo

[avinassh]

I love the homepage, simple and clean! Any screenshots of how it looks for logged users?

I noticed it uses MongoDB. That seems like an overkill to me, have you considered SQLite?

if you are open to taking feature requests:

- ability to add random notes

- any submitted link should be captured in archive / wayback machine

- (complicated) search within the submitted links content

[codazoda]

I didn’t try it but am surprised it’s using a DB. I thought it would be… plain-text.

[account-5]

Sounds like you're after zotero.

[herdst]

Why is MongoDB overkill?

[zhuxx]

I have just built a bookmark service dedicated for Hacker News, which use you own Notion pages as database.

https://hn.toonmaterial.com

[tzury]

Good old https://del.icio.us/ … No longer exists.

[jchook]

Nice, looks like you're off to a great start.

Here are some features I love about Pinboard.in that you could consider adding to Webtag as it grows:

- iOS/Android share extension, so I can easily bookmark anything from my mobile device. This is crucial for me as the friction is reduced enough that I will actually bookmark things and helps me keep everything in one place.

- Auto-complete tags, boy is this handy.

- Use AI to guess tags that I can easily add with a click. See this browser extension for an example: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pinboard-plus/mphdp...

- A description field that will auto-populate with my highlighted text or default to the site's metadata description. This helps a lot for finding things again without having to stuff a lot of text in an unwieldy title. In the search, I can vaguely describe what I'm looking for and often find it again.

- Semantic search. Pinboard doesn't have this but it could become the holy grail of bookmarking services by adding it. So often I have moments where I recall something I read years ago, but cannot remember the exact wording or how to find it again in a verbatim search function.

- Archival of bookmarks. Even merely automatically submitting the page to an archival site would suffice. The bookmark app I wrote uses a headless browser to save an MHTML file plus yt-dlp to fetch media, but it doesn't have the above features so I don't use it, ha.

- Server-side rendering. The little loading animation is just enough to make the site feel slow and almost defeats your goal of a dead-simple UI. Edit: Also I am seeing 600-700ms response times on the bookmarks endpoint.

For your homepage, I would recommend adjusting the wording on "Plain-text-based bookmarking. No fancy images or graphics." Coming from Pinboard, I was unsure what this meant exactly. At first I wondered if the service archived only the text of bookmarked pages like a "reader mode" feature, especially with the "no limits on storage" note. Also it's not literally plain-text in the typical sense (e.g. .txt files or plain-text accounting). It's just a clean UI. Maybe say "Simple text-only UI" or similar.

On the logged-in menu, I would change "Home" to "My Bookmarks" or similar.

It might be helpful to communicate to prospective users how you plan to fund the project long-term. When selecting a bookmarking service, reliability and longevity are going to be top factors. Free forever, no business plan, etc do not inspire that kind of confidence.

Overall, it's a great start. I wish you luck!

[oneeyedpigeon]

When I try to sign up I just get "something went wrong please try again"

[JMiao]

Getting “something went wrong please try again” on sign up page. Safari, iPadOS.

[fraencko]

Small typo: The button on the bookmarklet page says "bookmarkelet".

[huhtenberg]

All attempts to create an account fail with "429 Too Many Requests".

[911e]

No GDPR mentions, cannot delete account easily :-(

[flanbiscuit]

For a long time I wanted to figure out a way to organize my "bookmarks" that I have scattered all over the place. I have many many favorited posts on HN, I used Reddit's "save" feature, I add videos to "watch later" or some other playlist in Youtube, etc etc. I thought maybe I could one day unify all this into one place where I can tag them so I know why I bookmarked them (I have definitely sifted through pages of my HN favorites trying to find something). At this point though, I have too much to go through that the task seems daunting. But now that we have AI, I have shifted my mindset to wanting to just feed everything to AI and just have a chat interface where I can ask it for what I want. I feel like that is the future of organization (at least for me it is). Ideally it would be something self-hosted

[bsnnkv]

Your initial want is pretty close to I ended up creating for myself for all things text-based with https://notado.app. I ended up ditching my old stuff in Instapaper, Readwise and Pinboard back in 2020ish because it didn't really fit the data model[1] (content-first rather than link-first) and since then I'm very happy with how everything is archived[2], organized and shareable[3] in Notado.

I still think it's possible to go incredibly far with a good data model, fuzzy search, automated tagging and feed publishing.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...

[2]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/

[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-t...

[al_borland]

What I never understand about the chat interfaces is how I'm supposed to browse? With something like bookmarks, I sometimes go through my old bookmarks and find interesting/useful things I forgot all about. If it's all in AI, behind a chatbot, and I forget about something, how do I know to ask for it?

[hawski]

If I would ever be bothered enough to invest time in getting to know existing or making my own bookmarking system I would just like for it to cache the text from a thing I want to bookmark and offer a nice full text search over the whole archive. I think that, the HN's favorite, Pinboard has something like this.

I would think about going one step further and having a full text search over my whole browsing history with a way to penalize or remove certain hosts. Then I would love to augment my web searches to also include things from my archive.

I feel I would have a much bigger utility out of this in comparison to thing through AI, though I get it could be also beneficial. However AI, I believe, is costlier to run. A nice, properly indexed, full text search probably could run on a phone at least for a private archive.

[jackthetab]

Same here. I'm saving my pennies to buy a decent machine to work on precisely that.

[GGO]

I use linkding for that? Have you tried it? https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

[Valord]

Is this possible with tooling available today?

[jxy]

If you ever used w3m, it uses a local bookmark file. Something like this:

    $ cat ~/.w3m/bookmark.html
    <html><head><title>Bookmarks</title></head>
    <body>
    <h1>Bookmarks</h1>
    <h2>Searches</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="https://www.google.com/">Google</a>
    <!--End of section (do not delete this comment)-->
    </ul>
    <h2>Time Sink</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a>
    <!--End of section (do not delete this comment)-->
    </ul>
    </body>
    </html>

[kbrosnan]

Looks like a variation of the Netscape bookmark format.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

[hidelooktropic]

It's hard to understand from the description what this even is. Does it save your bookmarks in like a <ul> element? Is it clickable? What does it look like?

[selmetwa]

Really cool! I like that bookmarking seems to be making a comeback. I really like the low-tech approach. It would be cool if there was a social component to it as well.

I actually worked on a similar project centered around social bookmarking; https://huntergather.website/.

[pwillia7]

I recently came up with a new way to bookmark with Logseq and Raindrop that I like a lot -- https://reticulated.net/posts/a-better-bookmark-experience-w...

[severine]

I currently use Firefox bookmarks, synced through my Mozilla account. What would be the advantages for me if I were to use Webtag?

Related: does anyone know if there's any limit to synced bookmarks/history in Firefox?

[hardwaresofton]

Do you ever feel like Firefox is forgetting your bookmarks or search is bad?

Not endorsing this project or any other, but from time to time I’m a bit suspicious that firefox is dropping some links I’m sure I saved/not surfacing some links I’m fairly sure were related to my search.

Likely all in my head though!

[carlosjobim]

Why should somebody try to convince you in either direction? I can't see how it would matter to any other person how you specifically choose to sync your bookmarks.

[renegat0x0]

I wrote bookmark manager in Django.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

You can self host it.

You can add RSS sources and auto import new links regularly.

It may not be stare of the art, but gets the job done.

Demo below, but may not be working when you look at it. It runs on raspberry pi.

https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/catalog/entry/11503/

[TehShrike]

Sounds cool, but my bookmarks are too valuable to save on the servers of someone I'm not paying a subscription to :-x

[vasanthv]

This is open-source, you can spin up your own instance.

[jrm4]

Hey folks, another option that I've settled on (after messing with shaarli, shiori and a few others) is Buku.

Usually I really like plain text instead of dbs, but the killer here for me, I realize, is that I'm not tied to any one method of input OR output. Mainly, I do adding through a bookmarklet, and retrieval through "bukuserver," a self-hosted web thing. But also, I have the option of the command line (for bulk adding) as well as browser addons and other things, and (I use Syncthing) it doesn't matter "where" the db is, either on my machine or hosted on a vps.

https://github.com/jarun/buku

[burgerrito]

Interesting:

- Shiori (栞) means bookmark in Japanese

- Buku means book in Indonesian

[dsp_person]

> No limits on storage.

just need a BBD module (bookmark block device) and boom free unlimited disk backups

[ks2048]

About to encode my photo library as a set of "data:image/jpeg;base64" URLs...

[accrual]

I would like something like this but self-hosted. I have a collection of .html bookmark files from over the years and would love to consolidate them all into one place without having to sync them to Google/Microsoft/3rd party.

[joshka]

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab...

[TehShrike]

Looks like the source code is all public, so self-hosted is probably an option: https://github.com/vasanthv/webtag

[idlewords]

"Free unlimited bookmarks. No limits on storage."

No way that could backfire.

[darekkay]

I've also created an open-source plain-text bookmarking tool, Static Marks: https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

The bookmarks are stored in one or more YAML files, and static-marks generates a single web page on build.