Show HN: Free Plain-Text Bookmarking(webtag.io) |
Show HN: Free Plain-Text Bookmarking(webtag.io) |
No way that could backfire.
The bookmarks are stored in one or more YAML files, and static-marks generates a single web page on build.
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...
Persistence is the key.
- 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.
Unfortunately over the past several years it just feels like he's gotten burnt out on Pinboard and has stopped developing and is barely supporting it. I guess that's fine if everything works properly, but I don't really have a lot of confidence in the future of Pinboard anymore. I personally haven't had any actual problems with Pinboard yet, but have read several accounts by others who have and have found support poor to non-existent.
[1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...
[2]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/01/pinboard_co_prosperity_winn...
Thanks and nice work
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
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!
$ 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>https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...
I actually worked on a similar project centered around social bookmarking; https://huntergather.website/.
Related: does anyone know if there's any limit to synced bookmarks/history in Firefox?
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!
Example: If you tag one entry with "meta" and another with "metaverse", then search bookmarks for "meta", you'll get the union of anything containing meta. Particularly problematic in the case of short terms like "ux", "go", or "c".
I switched to buku and rofi-buku, which is more robust, convenient and accessible solution. And not tied to a single browser (I use several, for example, different browsers for leisure and for work).
Because we are on a tech website and as good samaritans we want to help each other out by sharing the information, knowledge, projects, tools or recommendations we have?
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.
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.
- Shiori (栞) means bookmark in Japanese
- Buku means book in Indonesian
just need a BBD module (bookmark block device) and boom free unlimited disk backups
Show HN: BookmarkFS – Store files as Chrome bookmarks that sync between devices
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...
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.
What specs do you think would be needed?
And I know of a generic blob store on top of (older) Snapchat API: https://github.com/hausdorff/snapchat-fs
It's really fun to "exploit" APIs in this way to create alternative uses.
> Add ^ to show only matches in your browsing history.
> Add * to show only matches in your bookmarks.
> Add + to show only matches in bookmarks you've tagged.
> Add % to show only matches in your currently open tabs.
> Add # to show only matches where every search term is part of the title or part of a tag.
> Add $ to show only matches where every search term is part of the web address (URL). The text “https://xn--ivg or “http://xn--ivg in the URL is ignored, but not “file:///”.
> Add ? to show only search suggestions.
You can select the search constraint in the dropdown if you don't want to memorize the list.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...
This is still an interesting workaround, I'll give a shot. Thanks!
Would be great, indeed, to see a working instance of Webtag.
I think I like 'em both, Pinboard and Linkhut, though.