[HN Gopher] How I centralize and distribute my bookmarks ___________________________________________________________________ How I centralize and distribute my bookmarks Author : todsacerdoti Score : 156 points Date : 2022-01-10 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (robinglen.medium.com) (TXT) w3m dump (robinglen.medium.com) | evo_9 wrote: | So you re-created delicious? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) | | What happened to Delicious: | https://www.failory.com/cemetery/delicious | abetusk wrote: | 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. | | """ | | [0] https://del.icio.us/help | alexpotato wrote: | I was a user of del.icio.us and now a VERY happy paying | customer of Pinboard. | | It really is an incredibly powerful tool that I use for all | kinds of things (e.g. | https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1447155166453567497) | | Every time I send someone a topical/relevant link for a | discussion or project I'm involved with, people always ask | "How do you find this stuff?". I mention that it's primarily | reading great Hacker News posts or tweets and just saving it | over time. | | Maciej's blog is also particularly entertaining including | both funny technical and non-technical posts. | gear_envy wrote: | Pinboard is $22 a year which is around $1.83 a month. | | Very reasonably-priced, might have to give it a try. | ushakov wrote: | there's also a nice Pins app (third-party) for mac, ios | LVB wrote: | I'm a longtime Pinboard user but it has some annoying | quirks. The biggest weakness for me is the limited search. | e.g. Yesterday I was trying to find my kids' school menu | site and searched for "menu"... nothing. Turns out I did | have it bookmarked, but the title is "Menus and Pricing". | So you have to search for "menus" to find it. I've made | suggestions to the developer on stuff like this over the | years but it hasn't improved much. | thearegee wrote: | I'm the author of the post, it was actually inspired by me | missing del.icio.us | kingcharles wrote: | 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. | wrycoder wrote: | Lots of times, just doing a current search on the title will | recover it. | kingcharles wrote: | Yeah, definitely a percentage of them are just "moved" | links.. things that pointed to say a .html file before | people realized that file extensions were out-of-date. | post_hoc_dog wrote: | Not distributing per se (even though this would be possible) but | I am storing my bookmarks in OneNote in a logical structure. | OneNote has the advantage to easily switch between browsers and | is fully searchable. | pmarreck wrote: | I log into Firefox Nightly and it syncs across all my Firefoxen. | epiecs wrote: | I have everything in zotero synched via webdav to my synology | nas. All my bookmarks and docs. Zotero also keeps an offline copy | + its as easy as clicking the button in whatever browser you are | using. | | You can also share this easily with other users | allochthon wrote: | 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.) | | https://digraph.app/ | | https://github.com/emwalker/digraph/ | h0p3 wrote: | Protip: fondly remember your dial-up modem days for a few moments | while your browser downloads and computes it: | https://philosopher.life/#:[tag[Link%20Log]!tag[Log%20Audit]] | | This is about half of my links to the web in the Hypertext. | Sometimes a different context is better for linking. I can't say | I know how to do it well enough. | onassar wrote: | 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 :) | | Bookee: https://onassar.github.io/extensions/bookee/ | raghavtoshniwal wrote: | https://www.oslash.com/ does something similar, with a nicer | interface and more collaboration. | rank0 wrote: | Anyone have experience using this project: | https://www.xbrowsersync.org/ ?? | | I have always wanted to self-host an instance of this app as I | use several different desktop/mobile browsers. | hrez wrote: | Yes, and it's great, including self-hosting. | wrycoder wrote: | No MacOS / iOS / Safari support. | overtomanu wrote: | i used it but i had problems with bookmarks starting with | chrome:// and "data:text/html;" syncmarx | https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/syncmarx/llcdegcpe... | | is a good alternative | hrez wrote: | I have chrome://settings/help and chrome://restart/ | bookmarked with no issues. | tconfrey wrote: | My similar scratch-my-own-itch solution is BrainTool[0] - a | bookmarking extension which syncs to a shareable org-mode file. | Nested topics, per-item notes and tab group support. | | [0] https://braintool.org | darekkay wrote: | 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. | | [0] https://darekkay.com/static-marks/ | thearegee wrote: | 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. | | Thank you | eavotan wrote: | 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.) | | https://github.com/jarun/Buku | | https://archivebox.io/ | | https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb | | [edited1 for formatting] [edited2 forgot to relate to the linked | article] | jaytaylor wrote: | Cool! This sounds like a great setup, better than mine (posted | in a separate reply in this thread). | | I've bookmarked your post for later ;), will have to go back | and review in detail when time permits. | m_a_g wrote: | 80k+ bookmarks... How many of them do you actually need and how | many of them are FOMO? | loceng wrote: | I have no idea how bookmarks I have but my plan is to | eventually use them to remind me of things I want to make | sure I want to cover in a book with quite a breadth, | regarding health and health systems, that I hope to write | some day. | glenstein wrote: | I assume that with something that extensive it's like a | research/knowledgebase type thing. | eavotan wrote: | Almost. | | Those bookmarks are more or less the tip of the iceberg. | And they were almost all created during $DAYJOB which was | years ago. Although already then (~2017) i had about 3500 | sources in my RSS Server. And of course, I lost track of | everything remotely interesting. | | Archiving those links was fundamental work for creating my | news blog, which is still run privately until I figure out | how to implement a community communication system (mostly | commenting) that will work on an IPFS backend. I mean, the | comment section of HN is what has made me come to this site | for years. | isaaafc wrote: | 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. | sigmonsays wrote: | everything supports links these days, so anything beyond firefox | already has links. That being said, I keep links in the following | systems 1. google docs 2. emacs and org 3. private github | markdown files | | These 3 systems allows me to adequately save links to almost | anything based on context. | | I wish the tools in this space were better to share bookmarks | between systems but it seems like a lost cause with all the | bookmark systems shutdown. | axegon_ wrote: | 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. | wrycoder wrote: | I spend about $11 a month to eliminate YT ads. The DYI stuff | there is just too good to miss. | basch wrote: | History should sync between all your devices. | | https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021218111-How... | dopylitty wrote: | 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! | robertlagrant wrote: | > 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. | phgn wrote: | 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). | WallyFunk wrote: | 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). | | [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306 | bullen wrote: | I also made a system for this: http://tentacle.rupy.se | | More out of inspiration from digg and similar sites. | zakokor wrote: | In 2019 I built my own bookmark while learn Reactjs, I launched | it as open source and I still use it even though I am the only | active user. This is an example with my profile: | https://pegao.co/@zakokor | karlicoss wrote: | 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. | | [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 | l00sed wrote: | 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: | | 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. | codeptualize wrote: | 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. | jaytaylor wrote: | 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: | | 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 :) | inanutshellus wrote: | 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. :-\ | voltaireodactyl wrote: | 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. | bckr wrote: | What would be the minimum useful version of this? | | How do you work with physical sources? | | What makes you think it's a pipe dream? | voltaireodactyl wrote: | Working with physical sources = being able to spread ten | books out on a table and easily flip between sections in a | tactile way (physical pages). That's really what I mean. | For some reason physical objects are much simpler to work | with (for me) and opening ten windows (even on a giant | screen) just doesn't work for me the same way. | | The minimum useful version for me would be something that | recognizes all media types AND allows commenting/notes in a | standard format that links between them and is easily | manageable. | | In particular that would mean for me: | | - read/highlight/notate/manage/organize functionality for | epubs, PDFs. | | - import physical books via ISBN and allow me to attach my | notes there (ideally with a companion phone app that lets | me scan/photograph relevant sections. | | - photo library (ideally containing the aforementioned book | pics while leaving them linked to the notes). | | - multiple routes for surfacing old stuff. | | But in all honesty: the reason I think it's a pipe dream is | because I'm fairly certain the limiting factor is being | human, not the technology. Like I'm kind of hoping for a | new paradigm for digesting media, but I also recognize | that's a pretty steep ask. | | Relatedly I've been trying to build what I'm talking about | out of emacs since COVID started, and I get some of the way | there by org roam + org noter, but the difficulty of | connecting emacs with various work cloud services and such | has proved quite daunting. | | But I'm still at it, because most tools of this nature are | dev centric, whereas I'm prose centric, so much of my | frustration comes from having tools that are CLOSE but fall | apart in the last mile workflow (for my purposes). | | Honorable mention to hookapp for mac, which I'm still | wrapping my head around but may end up solving some of my | nicher problem areas. | bckr wrote: | Thanks for going into detail on that. This makes me | wonder if information organization and traversal is truly | the killer app of AR + AI. Arrange your data like | physical objects. See the connections like literal | threads in 3D space. Have a librarian who can actually | understand your natural language queries help you find | things. | voltaireodactyl wrote: | For me it absolutely would be. Allow me to interact with | my (personal, DRM free, already owned and stored locally) | digital media as if it were physical media and you will | have my money day one (unless Zuckerberg). | LVB wrote: | 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. | SloopJon wrote: | 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. | 1MachineElf wrote: | I've the same fantasy, plus some extra features. The | organization of the browser tabs is also important. Sometimes | that's because a windows contains tabs all on an important | topic. Other times it's because there's a hierarchical- | ordering of the tabs. Either way, I'd like to save this | information in addition to the tab/bookmark and (optionally) | content. | mxuribe wrote: | Hmmm...like a sort of fuzzy IPFS, eh? I don't mean this | sarcastically...i lefgitimately think this is a good idea. I | knwo they have the wayback machine, etc...but i imagine you | mean a more local, personal thing...i like this idea! | wozacosta wrote: | Check out raindrop.io, it features search throughout your | bookmarks (even pdf contents are indexed) | | https://help.raindrop.io/using-search/ | zerkten wrote: | Doesn't pinboard.in support full-text archiving? If so, it's | probably still limited to public content. Conceivably a | bookmark extension could save a full-page screenshot and all | of the text, even if the page requires auth, isn't resolvable | from the internet, etc. | | I suffer from the same affliction for the most part, but I do | end up capturing sets of bookmarks related to research or | projects that I share with colleagues. It also sometimes | happens that I start a new browser profile for learning a | tech and save all my bookmarks from that with the code. That | has helped when it's a case of "how did I do this one thing I | know I did in throwaway project X?" | japhyr wrote: | 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. | 63 wrote: | 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. | ajvs wrote: | 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. | GaylordTuring wrote: | While we're plugging different software solutions for | creating indented lists, I would recommend TaskPaper 3 for | MacOS. It's a fantastic piece of software that runs natively | on Mac. | blowski wrote: | 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. | codeptualize wrote: | 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. | wwweston wrote: | 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. | | Kindof like a bookmark. | mark_h wrote: | 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. | defaultchar wrote: | I had the same problem. I made this browser add-on to try and | fix that... | | https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int... | basch wrote: | and like you always mean to someday migrate everything to | https://pinboard.in/ or https://historio.us/ but the task has | become so daunting? | kirubakaran wrote: | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-10 23:00 UTC)