My favorite was delicious, and then Pocket. Even Google had a bookmarking extension.
Is saving links no longer considered fashionable?
Yes, AI, but how does it go back to my favorite that I need to either read or revisit?
Should I vibe code one?
My favorite was delicious, and then Pocket. Even Google had a bookmarking extension.
Is saving links no longer considered fashionable?
Yes, AI, but how does it go back to my favorite that I need to either read or revisit?
Should I vibe code one?
37 comments
But I don't use browser bookmarks. I have a `~/home.html' that is my default home page and I organize it in a way that works for me. Any links I use regularly go in there, and I pretty quickly develop a memory for where they are on that page.
OTOH, back when del.icio.us was good, I used it for roughly the same purpose.
These days, I still send links to Instapaper when they are essays or articles. I send links to Raindrop.io when they are anything else, basically anything the Instapaper text extractor would fail on. Things like repos, interactive charts/graphs, photographs, videos, etc.
I still think it is behaving roughly as /dev/null. I do sometimes think that, at least nowadays, you can ask an LLM to visit your bookmarked links and do some semantic search over them. But I guess the best use case is just saving it for later/never rather than wasting time on it now.
Ha! I used Read It Later in a similar way. I thought of it as "Read It Never".
I've been meaning to build something like this
I found searching for and finding bookmarks a pain, so made a Chrome extension to natural language search with lunr.js. It works nicely and I open-sourced it.
Extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bookmark-search/fcj...
Code: https://github.com/jamesrr39/chrome-bookmark-search
However the Chrome-specific stuff is in this file: https://github.com/jamesrr39/chrome-bookmark-search/blob/mas... , and creating an equivalent for this should be enough to support firefox.
I am open to pull requests!
I keep a tab open if it’s something I want to look at later. I have like a bajillion opent tabs. Literal southands (plural). Once in a while I go through those and close a lot of them. Like hundreds at a time.
And I keep a web archive of a page in DEVONthink if already read it and I want to keep it for reference. Southands of pages spanning more than a decade back. Quite a few of them ar not on the web any more. Some are not on the Internet Archive either.
For read-it-later type bookmarking, like Pocket, I gave up. I never actually go back to read things later.
For “social” bookmarking, like delicious, I never really understood it, but I think sites like Reddit ended up filling that niche. My mental framework was always an evolution of forums, not bookmarking.
For most things, I can do a search and get to something faster than going to my bookmaker.
I use my standard browser bookmarks for my own little sites and things I go to multiple times every day. Then I have some others tucked away for cool sites that I think would be hard to find again. I then forget these exist and never visit, but when I remember they exist every 18 months or so, I go through them and they’re cool.
People misusing tabs for bookmarks need to get their head checked. Surely the only way you find anything is in the address bar anyway, an there they are equivalent.
I want a separate, local-only, bookmark application that saves the bookmark, takes a full snapshot of that page, and lets me grep through all the snapshots for whatever I'm searching for. So many of my bookmarks right now are suffering from link rot, a really cool feature would be to take bookmarks in your browser, and, if dead, search on waybackmachine and snapshot it.
[0] https://karakeep.app/
I recently tried LinkWarden and Linkding - neither of which I was particularly fond of.
The management and search and annotation options are very weak, but when you submit a link here at HN, you are also making a permanent bookmark that will remain accessible via your account
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
There’s also an option in the search settings which is supposed to enable or disable whether usernames are relevant
(Without quotes)
You'll be able to search things you responded to.
Additionally, if the content is of long term interest, I post the link to archive.org, ensuring its continual availability. (As a college professor, I have found too many great resources vanish with nothing as good replacing them. When that happens I just change the URL to the Internet Archive version.)
I keep them in an HTML file in git along with all my dot files.
[0] https://linkhut.org/
However, I've never used any bookmarking service. It makes sense if you want to share your bookmarks, but I prefer to keep them private.
It works great. It has a minimal set of features and can be self-hosted.
I'm paying pikapods to host it for me, but if I needed to, I can switch to doing it on my own.
Prior to that, I used pinboard (rip).
I don't know if there's much people using bookmarking tools, but to help you see another perspective, as a person who finds bookmarking tools not necessary I'd say it wouldn't worth your time to vibe code one. Also just for "vibe coding", be really really careful if you're gonna make it a "product" because you'll definitely face rough situations through it.
The problem with discussing bookmarks is that everyone has different needs. Some people want a system that takes snapshots, generates pdfs, allows for offline viewing, creates AI summaries, lets you share with other users, (supports other users), archives everything into a database, and more. Other folks just want a simple, literal bookmark system that only manages links to websites.
If you're in the latter category (like I am), the perfect system already exists. It's called xBrowserSync and it's wonderful. It's open source. You can self-host the sync server. Data is encrypted before leaving the client. It has browser extensions. It has an Android app. And it uses tags / search instead of endlessly nested folders.
But there's one huge problem: The project has been abandoned for years. The public sync servers are still up and running. But the Chrome extension has fallen into disrepair. I use Firefox, so I'm still good, but for how long?
And so every year I go on this quest to gauge the state of bookmark managers. It seems everyone is trying to build the 1st kind of system. I get it. You're not gonna convert users to subscriptions with a simple link database. But that's not the system I want.
So if you're just looking to sync web links between devices, in a private, browser agnostic way, organized with search tags instead of folders, and without having to manage a huge tech stack. Your current options are: xBrwoserSync, Linkding, Shaarli, and LinkAce.
The usual story is "I bookmarked 20,000 web pages over 3 years and then I realized I never looked at any of them!"
I built an "image sorter" which used to ingest image galleries using a bookmarklet which would queue the galleries to get crawled with a web crawler, I would then classify and rank the image galleries in an HTMX-based UI. I really do look at the images every day so it is successful in that sense. The web crawler started running into Cloudflare problems so now I save the whole page with the browser and have a Python script harvest the pages out of my Downloads folder.
Because the moment it evolves into publicly available, then it would suck me into the dopamine of adding features for others :-)
That is some number. Mine would have been similar, but they got lost as I moved between tools.
In fact I've been using Shortcuts instead of bookmarks lately, as those will open on any Apple device in the default browser for the device, not limited to whatever browser you happened to bookmark them in.
[1]: https://github.com/sebsauvage/Shaarli
[2]: https://sebsauvage.net/links/