82 points by indus 7 days ago
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?
Instapaper has a lovely "Shuffle" sort option. I usually don't feel like reading what I saved last, and randomly picking one of the first 5 articles the Shuffle option presents ensures that I read at least something!
I tried to use various LLMs to go through my Instapaper stuff. It was probably 6-12 months ago and it didn't like any of my attempts.
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 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.
I've been meaning to build something like this
By the time you go back to read it, the link will be broken.
- native browser bookmarks: things I visit regularly and want to access quickly, like the website of my bank. - read-later-links: I send it to my todo app, and read it the next day or delete it. No piling off links I never read. - topic-specific links like "tool to extract tables from PDFs" go into my note taking system (in my case Obsidian), where I can also write notes on the links properly
I still bookmark websites. Just in the standard browser, not in Pocket, etc.
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...
Most likely not in it's current state as it uses the `chrome.bookmarks.getTree()` API.
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!
Obsidian, along with my notes on everything else in life. I made an Apple Shortcut that saves the contents of a webpage along with its links to my Obsidian as markdown text and as a pdf, so I use that to save blog posts etc that I enjoyed.
This is probably a bit unorthodox, but I use tab session manager [0] for firefox. I started using it mainly to be able to save an open window to return to a project, and it ended up replacing my bookmarks. My issue with bookmarks was always the friction of managing them, but for whatever reason it fits my mental model to organize by open windows.
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.
Interesting, I may need to try this out. I tend to have a similar approach but it sometimes results in keeping tabs open for along time, or dealing with a restore previous session everytime I start up.
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.
I still bookmark websites, but only using Firefox's native bookmarks, not on external sites. I have tried using start.me for bookmarking, but it's kind of uncomfortable compared to just tapping the browser's "star" button and have it synchronized between my two (three? Firefox on windows acts as a different device than Firefox on Linux; makes sense since none of them can access data from the other) devices. I have tried making my own bookmark site, but failed. I often have a WhatsApp group, Telegram chat or Discord channel, where I drop all the links.
I built a simple bookmark manager myself a couple of years ago:
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku
;) It's like hoarding... I hoard links and knowledge, but rarely go back to them. I think I need therapy.
I had amassed a lot of bookmarks. I finally got around deleting them and felt "free"
I have learnt to let go
The one time I ever looked at my bookmarks was when I was on a long flight bored of my laptop with no internet, then I realized I had used an extension that cached my bookmark content so I read a bunch of articles, blog posts, and HN comment threads.
Never touched them again.
I don't think you should stress yourself out by viewing everything solely from a productivity perspective. I use Linkding and have bookmarks for everything that interests me. I see it more as a personal history or memory that I can refer back to. Linkding has a very good search function for this and can also be integrated into Google or SearxNG search results via a Chrome extension.
I hit Ctrl+Shift+D on dozens of tabs multiple times a day.
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.
iirc it's called FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), I'm guilty of it too! LOL
Yes we do. I am using https://yabs.io which is quite similar to good old delicious. It's free and ads free too.
i just send everything into a big discord chat and then never read it.
Pinboard (still decent, just don't expect your money back if you pay for the permanently broken PDF export feature) until I can self-host Linkding[1].
[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pulls?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+l...
Same here. Only bookmarks, with regular backups (export). And tags - lots and lots of tags to easily find them again.
I've completely abandoned browser-based bookmarking. It became an unsearchable digital graveyard. Now my workflow is:
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.
Self hosting Karakeep[0] for this. I think next step is to carve out time on Sunday morning to go through things and put them in lists of read vs unread.
There are plenty of options still out there (raindrop.io, Instapaper, Safari’s reading list, etc). No need to vibe code your own, unless you want to.
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.
In social bookmarking delicious was the perfect platform, pinboard is the spiritual sucessor but apparently it has not the same technical support it used to have https://notes.kateva.org/2024/09/the-end-times-have-come-for...
Tired of relying on other people's servers I'm moving links from google keep and browser to linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
I only bookmark references, not articles, and just use my browser's bookmarks. At most when for example planning a vacation or big purchase I'll make a folder and bookmark a bunch of relevant stuff, then delete the folder afterwards. If I see an article I want to read I'll just open it in another tab and read it. If I don't finish all my articles that day I can leave them open for a while, and then when I come back to it I often find that I don't actually care to read it as much as I thought, so I'll skim it or just close it unread
HN itself is a bookmarking tool, BTW
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
Let me know if there's ever a tool to search HN limited to discussions I've interacted with in some way eg. submission/favorite/comment (public) or upvote. My interactions disappear quickly and are no help when trying to find that one relevant discussion to link.
The weird answer is that at least some of that functionality is already there. But the documentation and fine control of the search is lousy:
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
Sorry for causing some confusion here; I understand I can search using Algolia's author: keyword within my own comments. I want to limit my searches to all comments by anyone within discussions that were interesting to me in any way.
That would be useful. I assume the feature doesn’t exist. You could ask for it, or maybe it’s possible to develop an external search site or tool that can do that.
After years of jumping between different platforms and systems I've landed on linkhut [0]. I like that it's social by default and chronological-oriented, with flexible but really basic options for organization (tags and 'read later' flag). It makes it so that bookmarking neat things actually feels like it has a point, even if I don't always organize them in a way I can easily find later.
I save my book mark URLs in a file and clean it up from time to time. I’ll pass it to a LLM for format as bookmarks for my browser. Then I quickly scan thru all the bookmarks for updates to particles. Mostly news and blogs. Doing it this way I find it more structured and my MONTHLY review is done infrequently.
Here is my strategy for bookmarking:
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.
Yes. Not interested in putting them in the cloud in the slightest. 99% of what's on my desktop i don't want/need on my phone, work or whatever.
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.
No. It’s a pita to organize and most information I consume is dynamic.
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.
Yes, heavily.
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 use are.na to store links in appropriate channels. I have their chrome extension mapped to a keyboard shortcut on my desktop. On mobile I use a separate shortcut. I save links many times throughout the day, trying to curate content that I think is useful or interesting. I’m building several tools derived from this practice.
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/
Yes, but I can never find what I'm looking for again because I don't organize them myself and Firefox mobile's bookmark search is bordering on unusable. Sorting by date doesn't seem to work at all and I can't find anything I've bookmarked in the past year.
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.
Yes I heavily use bookmarks. I got back into it a few years ago when I quit going to large forums like Reddit and needed a way to remember important URLs I knew I'd want later.
I keep them in an HTML file in git along with all my dot files.
The solution I use is a script that periodically updates a simple URL database by filtering the TLS/HTTPS proxy log. The proxy software is configured to record the full URL for every HTTP request in a response header. Thus the log contains all URLs that have been accessed. Generally, I do not use a "modern" browser. I send HTTP requests using a variety of software. The log captures all HTTP requests from all software.
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.
The proxy log contains the timestamps but not the titles
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
I've been using Shaarli[1] for the past 15 years, and I'm very happy with it. The code base is small and stable enough (the official version hasn't got a single update over the past 12 years, even though the author is still using it daily[2]) you can easily tweak it to your tastes.
I use a self hosted book manager. To be honest it is effectively write only memory. I assume it is still being written to the DB, but browsing them has been broken for a long time. I assume that I can fix this if I really need to find a bookmark, but so far it has been a few years. Yet, if I don't bookmark it, I just have a terrible time letting go of tabs that I think I'd like to follow up on some month/year in the future.
I keep my bookmarks where they belong (usually in browser, with tags). I search interactively in a terminal (with a custom script and alias). It works well to select and open topic-related bookmarks at once.
I kinda do.
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.
Yes, especially in work where information is hard to find and when someone sends a URL in an email it's like gold dust. I spent 15 minutes last week trying many permutations of search terms to find our internal job site and in the end gave up and just asked someone else if they had the link.
Less so on the public web because search engines are so effective.
Yes, this right here. I’ve had SRE‘s send me links that would be literally impossible to find if I did not bookmark them. Want to authenticate to our corporate AWS accounts using our corporate SSO? Here s my obscure link.
I bookmark stuff I refer to frequently, but not really stuff that I want to "read later." I figure if I want to read it later I'll search for it then.
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.
Yes, I have a lot of bookmarks. When I bookmark a page, I add some keywords to the bookmark's title so I can easily find it in the future. It's not strictly tagging, I just try thinking of words the future me could use when searching for a particular bookmark.
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.
I only bookmark sites that I go to regularly and end up on my shortcut bar, but I do use "Add to reading list" pretty often. I couldn't tell you the practical difference since I still have stuff on there from years ago, but it feels less permanent. Sometimes I just goofing around before bed and see something I want to check out in the morning.
I still bookmark using my browser. Periodically I back them up.
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 switched from Raindrop to Linkwarden. The reading/annotation is not as smooth but I don't really use it for that. It's self hostable and has integration with floccus for bookmark syncing with a browser.
Yes. If you're into it, it has an AI tagging feature that will add tags based on content.
My bookmark manager lightweight for organizing, storing, and managing your bookmarks with an intuitive user interface.
Occassionally at times yeah, but mostly via google bookmarks. Way more simpler than using a third party service like pinboard, since it's readily easily visible right on your toolbar chain
I'm using linkding: https://linkding.link/.
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.
I even store links of even twitter accounts in emacs org file. I then once a week click them all and read them all in one go. So yes.. I absolutely do. Thanks for asking. I am not alone.
Honestly, since the first day I switched to Firefox I'm just saving to it's own bookmarks. Whenever I wanna check those websites I just open it either from my desktop or my laptop(s), since it's syncing in between my devices.
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.
Anyone knows an extension for firefox that creates a slideshow out of your bookmarks and changes the link every 2 seconds? would be real nice to have something like this on an empty new tab
I rarely bookmark anything. If anything, my browser's history is adequate to find anything I need to pull back up, I can start typing in the address bad and it'll get suggested.
It's a solved problem: in the browser. For read-it-later, I just use the Reading List in Safari. Sometimes, I paste them in a .txt file -- and use Cmd+Click to open.
I just use the browser feature where history fails. No need for a middleman to share, links all the way down
Honestly, these days I save links in my Obsidian vault. I have an "Inbox" file as a raw dump of thoughts, links, todos, ephemeral notes etc, and every once in a while I revisit links living in there and categorise them into the appropriate knowledgebase files or delete them.
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.
Yes, honestly I still do that! I know it's old school. But it works. easy to use, fast access and free, lool!
Of course - even if the site get pulled the title and URL are usually enough to find it or similar again
Another shot at a bookmark manager is welcome.
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.
This post makes me realise I do, both in terms of browser bookmarks and in a more elaborate way in a similar read-it-later sense that other commenters have mentioned. I've not even thought of it as bookmarking until now though.
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.
Bookmarks... This is a rabbit hole I dive down at least once a year. And always come up disappointed.
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.
I use bookmarks to make websites show up in the addressbar.
I have browser bookmarks for things I go to frequently, but occasionally need to prune them due to actual disuse. For everything else, I used to use Pocket, but then switched to a self-hosted Wallabag interface. The UI could use a little tweaking, but it works for my purposes. There’re browser extensions to save stuff and even a decent iOS app.
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?
Not really, I have some bookmarks in my toolbar from decades ago that still see the odd click, but mostly I just rely on history, ie "dev 461" gets me to our JIRA board with my usual filters, "github PROJECT" / "github PROJECT pulls" get me to the project or the pull requests.
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 sometimes describe Instapaper as "/dev/null for web content". I reflexively share to Instapaper not to read it later, but to absolve guilt for not reading it at all. It is one of my weirdest web habits, on reflection.
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.