Ask HN: Do you still bookmark websites? Many bookmarking tools were created, and then most got sucked into the tech's "how do I make more money cycle?" and died. 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? |
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 :-)
First, I use regular bookmarks in Safari for pages I might visit "often," i.e. more than once. This makes them immediately searchable in Alfred and really fast to open.
Secondly, I use a multipronged Emacs system which allows me to easily file and sort links that I browse on a given day into an org-roam journal file. First, anything from Elfeed (rss reader) that I open or engage with gets logged. Second, I can save the currently open browser tab's URL with a keyboard shortcut. I've also mapped a 4 finger trackpad press to this which makes it super automatic and easy to do. I try doing this for everything I read and/or engage with, since I often find myself thinking "what was that one thing," and this has helped me find it on multiple occasions now. Third, there's a dedicated way to capture the URL with a PROCESS todo state tag. All of these show up in my org agenda buffer which means I see them all the time and go through them every once in a while. Fourth, a dedicated shortcut (and trackpad 4 finger force press) both logs the page and sends it to Wallabag, which is a sort of self-hosted pocket alternative. This is synced with my Kobo ereader (with the Koreader operating system) and I tend to read through the interesting articles at a pace only slightly slower than they accumulate, so it tends to be manageable.
For videos, I also have a quick docker service that allows me to yt-dlp a video, save it as mp3, and add it to an RSS feed for a podcast I host for myself, so I can listen to them on the go.
In general I'm trying to separate the act of seeing a piece of media to engage with and consuming said piece of media. One notable benefit is that something that might have seemed interesting later turns out not to be. On the other hand, logging most things I engage with comes in handy a lot when I'm talking to someone and something I barely paid any mind to in the past comes up!
In the future, I intend to expand the system with logging of the content as well as the URL, and adding embedding support with a vector database to allow for both full-text and semantic search. Retrievability is the biggest pain point right now (though ripgrep is already perfect for 80% of the usecases).
Since it's all integrated with org-roam, I can also quickly "promote" links to full nodes, link them to other concepts, etc. This comes in super handy with quickly going through a lot of literature by following arXiv feeds via RSS. Having it all in one system is super handy.
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.
Never been interested in bookmarking tools, and to me being able to save notes next to the link is a simple but effective use case.
That being said, I have the common problem of forgetting to actually read any of it later. I’ll have sessions where I go through it once or twice a month, cleaning out the “inbox”, but I have so many starred links I’ll probably never go back to, so I have to wonder sometimes: what’s the point?
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.
I hate the fact that I am not able to self-host Firefox Sync.
I miss del.icio.us. That was my favorite, by far.
At least for work, if I'd lose my bookmarks my productivity would plummet until I could get them back. (Fortunately?) I don't remember how to even start looking for all the Jira links I have saved.
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.
Prior to that, I used pinboard (rip).
If it's important or often used it gets a spot in the browser bar. Otherwise gets filed away in some folder in my bookmarks.
I also still use the favorite on HN, but I need a way to process these.
I use Firefox and so use an extension called Floccus[0] to sync my bookmarks via my own Nextcloud instance.
I also use a self hosted instance of Wallabag[1] to store pages that I bookmark for reading later (as opposed to bookmarking as a utility) so that I never have it happen that the article/blog/etc has disappeared when I finally get to reading it.
Can't say I know, or care, if bookmarking is fashionable. It works well for me, and with this setup I am in control of my links.
[0]: https://floccus.org/
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.
I keep them in an HTML file in git along with all my dot files.
This allows me to quickly search for past URLs, irrespective of what software was used to send the corresponding HTTP request.
The proxy is bound to a localhost address.
For the titles I could extract them from pcaps; I also have a running tcpdump capture that logs to a (daemontools) multilog directory
The URL consumption might be different, and difficult to compare, for a number of reasons, e.g.,
I do not use a browser that sends automatic HTTP requests for resources like images, CSS files, Javascripts, etc.
I do not use a browser that runs Javascript so there are no XHR or other Javascript-triggered requests
I do not use remote DNS, I use "curated" DNS data, so the URLs are only for resources at domains I specifically request
I use HTTP/1.1 pipelining so I have large numbers of URLs that are for resources from a single domain, for example DoH (I do not include these in the URL database)
Generally the proxy log is rather clean and excludes garbage requests that are being sent automatically; IME, use of a "modern" browser will fill a log with such garbage
The proxy's self-signed certificate blocks many potential requests from hardware with pre-installed software from so-called "tech" companies, e.g., Google, Apple, Microsoft, because the TLS connections fail
These attempted connections to the mothership are incessant; they would fill a proxy log with garbage URLs if they were accepted
All this makes it easier to for me keep a URLs database; storing all those garbage URLs would make the database less useful
Articles from 5 years ago are mostly useless today. Maybe for someone else they might be valuable, but I’m not a librarian not interested in collecting garbage. Very few things are worth collecting, and I enjoy collections. (Not hoarding which is what bookmarking is)
As for cooking I make my own recipes from things I find online.
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.
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.
Plus, FF account
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.
Less so on the public web because search engines are so effective.
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.)
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.
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.
However, I did still find one-off AI summaries to be very helpful in getting through the backlog to get me down to 0. I now stay at 0. If there is a long article I don't feel like reading, but want to know more than the headline, I will use the AI summary in my browser. That's usually good enough to absolve the guilt, without creating more guilt by adding something to the reading list.
I've been meaning to build something like this
Ha! I used Read It Later in a similar way. I thought of it as "Read It Never".
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...
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!
It's really nice to open up a window or group of windows related to a project that I haven't touched in a few months and it just be one click. Plus, if I open up new tabs those also get saved for the next time. It also works for easily pulling up my regular work session so I don't need to manually open up the 8 or so tabs I always need in a workday. Something toaybe check out if you already organize open windows by task or project.
I keep bookmarks for specific things, sometimes ephemerally and sometimes to keep the link for reasearch, etc. Every so often I make a pass through a bunch of bookmarks and delete the ones that have rotted. Or try to point to an archive mirror if available. That process does a decent job getting rid of the junk. I do need to work on isolating my personal from my work reading when at home. I use different windows but I should be using different profiles or something.
;) It's like hoarding... I hoard links and knowledge, but rarely go back to them. I think I need therapy.
I have learnt to let go
Never touched them again.
Browser search does work pretty good tho for something like pulling that specific article I saw on the New Yorker last week or the new pizza restaurant I came across last month.
https://github.com/anthonylatona/chrome_random_bookmark
I missed delicious and built https://linkfeed.io for myself to have a way to quickly post a link to a public page like this https://linkfeed.io/l/anthonylatona. It's very basic but not bad for a 1-week coding challenge!
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+l...
I recently tried LinkWarden and Linkding - neither of which I was particularly fond of.
For quick reference: I use Memex (open source) which actually makes bookmarks full-text searchable. Game changer.
For deep diving later: I instapaper.com everything. The "permanent library" feature is my second brain for articles.
The real shift: I now bookmark ideas, not just links. If a page has a crucial insight, I'll paraphrase it in my note-taking app (Obsidian) and link back to the source. The bookmark serves as a citation, not the destination.
The browser's native bookmarking feels like a relic from the era of static web pages. The modern web needs tools that can handle the volume and help you actually retrieve information contextually.
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.
Tired of relying on other people's servers I'm moving links from google keep and browser to linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
That is some number. Mine would have been similar, but they got lost as I moved between tools.
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.
Mostly it just lets you apply any arbitrary number of tags to a link and the groups then together. The other key was building a bookmarklet to make saving them easy.
I don’t plan on monetizing it or really adding that many new features, but it’s worked great for me for a few years now.
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 have my own custom frontpage.html as browser's homepage, where are links for websites I visit daily (e.g. HN). In that frontpage there is a tab, which shows links.txt content in iframe, where I throw links that I feel I should sometime revisit. I also have random.txt for random copypaste storage that shows in its own iframe tab.
If I encounter something I feel contains very important reading, I just take a full page screenshot of the webpage with Firefox's screenshot tool as png, so it won't linkrot/vanish. If the page is too long for png, I print it as PDF.
My are.na bookmarks: https://www.are.na/ya-1sec/bookmarks-1ntdk32bur0
An app i made that surfaces a random page harvested from a few interesting channels: https://moonjump.app/