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Ask HN: Does anybody still use bookmarking services?

417 points3 years

If not, do you collect web pages some other way?

l723 years ago

I have started doing something completely different than using bookmarks. I set up yacy[1] on a personal, internal server at my home, which I can access from all my devices, since they are always on my wireguard vpn.

Yacy is actually a distributed search engine, but I run in 'Robinson mode' as a private peer, to keep it isolated, as I just want a personal search of only sites I have indexed.

Anytime I come across something of interest, I index it with yacy, using a a depth of 0 (since I only want to index that one page, not the whole site). This way, I can just go to my search site, and search for something, and anything related that I've indexed before pops up. I found this works way better than trying to manage bookmarks with descriptions and tags.

Also, yacy will keep a cache of the content which is great if the site ever goes offline or changes.

If I need to browse, I can go use yacy's admin tools to see all the urls I have indexed.

I have been using this for several months and I am using this way more than I ever used my bookmarks.

[1] https://yacy.net/

kybernetikos3 years ago

This is great, and is something I've wanted for a while. I use pinboard which is supposed to have similar capabilities (click 'search full text', 'search mine' after turning on and paying for 'archiving'), but I've never been totally confident in it (pages would change, and the cached version was updated to a 404 page), and ended up letting my archiving subscription lapse.

I think google used to offer something that did this as well as search all your local files, but I think that went the way of all gThings.

mitchdoogle3 years ago

There's also https://historio.us/ - it's essentially same as what OP is doing but it's as easy as bookmarking

kybernetikos3 years ago

That does look pretty cool, and unusually for a SaaS has chosen a pricing I think is reasonable for the service (not everything should be $9 a month!).

Do you know if it does pdfs? That's a key thing I want in this kind of service.

kerneis3 years ago

I use Zotero for this and it shines at pdfs. It does webpage snapshots too. Discussed below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31849987

aaaaaaaaata3 years ago

All of Stavros' stuff is reasonably priced and sexy.

kybernetikos3 years ago

That's a good one, but I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

> Google Desktop was a computer program with desktop search capabilities, created by Google for Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows systems. It allowed text searches of a user's email messages, computer files, music, photos, chats, Web pages viewed, and the ability to display "Google Gadgets" on the user's desktop in a Sidebar.

Discontinued in September 2011

+1
prepend3 years ago
Veen3 years ago

I'd love something similar to automatically crawl and index every site I visit. I'm forever losing stuff. I know I saw it but I can't remember where.

mttjj3 years ago

This is Mac only and I have no affiliation other than I like this developer but your request reminded me that he just launched this app: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-history-book

prepend3 years ago

That’s a really genius idea. I also like the author’s pricing mode. I was fearing some stupid “$10 is just the price of coffee. This is worth 24 coffees a year for the rest of your life” and have a reasonable $7 purchase price.

+1
kamray233 years ago
chillpenguin3 years ago

I use BrowserParrot for this. Works really well.

https://www.browserparrot.com/

dingleberry4203 years ago

> Right now we only support MacOS

hcarrega3 years ago

loving :) thanks

thinkmassive3 years ago

ArchiveBox documents how to automatically archive links from your browser history:

https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Usage#Import-l...

skinnymuch3 years ago

Archive box can do authentication too. Haven’t checked if yacy can. Pinboard can’t. Pocket can.

asselinpaul3 years ago

https://heyday.xyz comes to mind

nix233 years ago

Use the yacy-proxy funktion.

slammm3 years ago

I had trouble with that, I ended up using this userscript https://github.com/JeremyRand/YaCyIndexerGreasemonkey

akrymski3 years ago

I use Google for this. It's really annoyingly good at finding previously visited pages.

fudged713 years ago

Vortimo

a5huynh3 years ago

A bit different, but I've been building something similar that runs locally: https://github.com/a5huynh/spyglass

You create some rules for topics you want to index and it'll go out and crawl them. Searching through it is a global hotkey away.

luckman2123 years ago

Spyglass looks amazing! Thank you for this.

a5huynh3 years ago

Thank you! Feel free to ping me on Github/Discord if you run into any issues, always looking to make it better :)

BiteCode_dev3 years ago

Nice

I have wished for a while that browser would store the entire page of any bookmark you save automatically, and put a decent search engine on it. I wrote a script once to do it for my bookmarks, and it didn't even take that much space on my hard drive.

Your system could be a Firefox addon, kinda like what scrapbook used to be, but automatic. Even with a note system, and storing metadata, Zotero style, but without the need for the dual setup.

account423 years ago

How mozzilla is not pursuing that kind of innovation in Firefox itself is beyond me. Instead they continously try to ape the Chrome UI and collect telemetry without permission so that they can give you "exciting" "new" features like colorways.

Nition3 years ago

What a good idea. A search engine like Kagi could support importing your existing bookmarks as a custom lense.

jrochkind13 years ago

Nice! How about getting it to automatically index your whole search history?

Not what you're going for -- you don't have a list of specifically opted-in 'bookmarks' to browse.

but I have often wanted "wait, what was that site involving X I was looking at maybe last week?"

pmoriarty3 years ago

It would also be nice to be able to search through my aggregated browsing history on every device I use.

Maybe I should open a feature request to Google/Fracebook to provide an API hook for that, since they probably already have all that information anyway.

hbarka3 years ago

This. I wonder if there is a way to direct my searches first to the domains I have ever visited. Oftentimes I will search for something that I am sure I’ve hit before but can vaguely remember which result set it was that scored my search.

Jarwain3 years ago

My chrome history appears to aggregate my browsing across devices Anyways, so it should just be a matter of exposing that info

CRConrad3 years ago

Firefox probably does too, if you're logged in.

nix233 years ago

Yes works, you just need to use the proxy function of yacy, and everything get s indexed.

jrochkind13 years ago

Facebook doesn't share data out in APIs!

rasulkireev3 years ago

This is insane! Thanks for recommendation! Was able to set it up relatively quickly and now have a personal search of all the things that I find interesting, this is insane!

keyle3 years ago

How does the process of bookmarking goes then? meaning, how hard is it to add something to crawl with depth0 on a day to day. Can it be done with a bookmarklet?

jxm2623 years ago

Ive never even considered something like this before, but its genius!

The offline caching sounds awesome.

Thanks for sharing

mejutoco3 years ago

This is how I always imagined the search engines of the future to work. All the data is local first and the user is in control.

sanwrencho3 years ago

me too, when I first used delicious I was hoping that individual curators could provide a more in-depth "meta search" engine! Pocket is not bad, it provides some interesting links to new stuff on the web.

tecoholic3 years ago

I really liked this setup. The only point of friction for me was adding the links to the index via the crawler everytime. So I created a Firefox Extenstion to do it directly from the address-bar.

If someone is interested, you can download it from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yacy-it/

Limitation: It currently supports only YaCy running on localhost and unprotected. You might have to configure CORS as outlined here -> https://github.com/tecoholic/yacy-it#configuring-yacy

johntash3 years ago

Thanks for this recommendation! Do you only index things with a depth of 0? I just set Yacy up a couple days after seeing this post, and didn't realize what that meant at first.

Now I have 10s of 1000s of pages indexed after importing my bookmarks/history, and I'm wondering if it'd be more useful to _only_ index the pages I've visited/bookmarked, or if it'd also be good to crawl those sites further.

I guess one distinction would be whether or not I thought I could use Yacy as a full-time replacement for google/ddg. It'd be nice if I could index "everything", but then have a toggle to search only my bookmarks/history or something similar to that.

dopidopHN3 years ago

Thanks this look neat. Can you easily share index accros clients?

Edit : looks like the docker config allow to mount a arbitrary folder , that folder can be shared. I don’t need it to be concurrent proof.

Again, thanks this look nice.

mitchdoogle3 years ago

If anybody is interested in this, there is also a service which offers very similar thing: https://historio.us/

stavros3 years ago

That's mine! Feel free to drop a line if you need anything.

ryan293 years ago

I have 3 tech related subscriptions; BorgBase, JetBrains, and historio.us. I self-host everything, but I've never found anything that replaces historio.us. It indexes just enough to always get me a complete copy of the data I want cached and the search results are just right. I often have about 1 page of search results when I'm looking for old info and I can pick out the page I'm looking for instantly.

I use it a lot when I'm learning something new. As I'm looking for beginner info I'll often find more advanced stuff that I'd like to try or learn at some point, but I don't have a good enough understanding to know if it's truly useful info. I historify those sites and move on knowing that I can find it in my historio.us search at a later date.

I also reference cached pages in a lot of my personal docs. I recently started using ArchiveBox for that, but the search doesn't make it a good replacement for the above use case.

I've been using historio.us since 2011 (!) and have never found anything to replace it. Great job!

stavros3 years ago

Thanks, I'm glad you like it! I really should give it some love, but I'd need to do a fairly sizable rewrite for most stuff...

cupofpython3 years ago

"i like historious" as the only review at the bottom gave me a laugh for some reason

jrib3 years ago

product looks very promising!

Some UI feedback: I went to check out https://historio.us/ and on my macbook air I saw the top of the green button "see our plans". Took me a couple of clicks until I realized I had to scroll down to click the real "plans and pricing" button that was off my screen.

stavros3 years ago

Ahh, thanks! The same link is at the top, but I'll see if I can reposition.

account423 years ago

That sounds really cool. How difficult is this to set up?

How confident are you that this will keep your bookmarks safe? Losing indexed data might not be such a big concern for a search engine that is intended to re-index everything continuously.

I defnitely felt betrayed when I found out that Firefox automatically deletes old history :/ I guess they think that most users need to trash their profile to fix some obscure bug before that anyway...

brokenkebab23 years ago

Can it cache indexed pages? If not how do you deal with disappearance/changes online?

l723 years ago

Yes, it does automatically keep a cache from when it indexed the site. I have it set to not automatically recrawl sites, so the cache is from when I added the site.

aguynamedryan3 years ago

I'd love to hear more about how you set all this up, particularly, do you have some sort of extension or bookmarklet that submits the current page to yacy's crawler?

pacifika3 years ago

Nice! I’ve been working on and off on a similar idea (searchable index of link contents) as a cli app eventually web web frontend. It’s on Python so packaging has been an issue.

hcarvalhoalves3 years ago

Didn't know about yacy – interesting! Thank you

srinathkrishna3 years ago

This is fascinating! I've been meaning to set something up on a spare rpi for this and I hadn't heard of yacy before. Thanks!

RF_Savage3 years ago

That's an awesome idea. I'll have to look into this. Been looking for something like this.

omitmyname3 years ago

That's amazing! I wanted to make something similar. Thank you!

ericcholis3 years ago

This is an incredible idea.

ComputerGuru3 years ago

How does yacy handle paywalls? Does it use the cookies from your browser instance or can it use bypass services like 12ft and co?

rsolva3 years ago

I have tried many different solutions the last two decades, but none of of them really stuck or became useful over time. I kinda gave up and as a last ditch effort started to do the simplest thing I could think of: ctrl+D to add bookmarks in Firefox, jotting down a few keywords on each entry. No folders, no structure, just a flat list and some keywords.

A few months in I noticed how powerful this simple system was. When talking with someone else about a tool, github-repo or article I had seen but did no remember the name or title of, finding it back was suddenly a breeze. Since I keep my desktop and mobile bookmarks in sync, it it just a matter of typing in a keword in the address bar in firefox and it shows up instantly!

On desktop, you can limit the search to bookmarks only by starting with a *, which is helpful to avoid browser history etc.

I have really low bar for adding a bookmark now as the mental overhead is so low and it is done notime. It has become the second brain I always wanted :)

JamesLeonis3 years ago

I also use Firefox bookmarks. To tack onto this, you can also select multiple tabs and bookmark them all into a bookmark folder.

jcul3 years ago

Another related feature I find very useful is you can right click a bookmark folder and open all the bookmarks in separate tabs.

It's useful for grouping a set of pages that you use together, but only now and then.

MrVandemar3 years ago

I also do this, but I don't like my browser cluttered up with thousands of accumulated bookmarks, many of which I don't return to. So I export them every month, delete the embedded favicons, and then wipe. If I want to find something I just grep for it.

A bit primitive, but it works for me.

JoshTriplett3 years ago

I do this as well, and then Firefox Sync ensures I have the same bookmarks on laptop and mobile.

amazing_stories3 years ago

Good tip. I just recently started tagging my bookmarks because I have too many to easily sort.

memcg3 years ago

I use Firefox bookmarks too and sync so new devices are easy to setup. The "Bookmark search plus 2" add on allows you to search folder names and shows which folder a bookmark is stored in.

makapuf3 years ago

I do this, as well as having an automated menu with 10 last bookmarks to continue reading things I just bookmarked

ngetchell3 years ago

How do you accomplish this?

deamanto3 years ago

Yep and also doing a ctrl+b you can search your bookmarks from the sidebar too

pratyushmittal3 years ago

I (still) use Pinboard: https://pinboard.in/u:pratyush

  Reasons:
  1. Archives - those tutorials and guides stay when the original pages go 404
  2. API - I use the api to automatically post my bookmarks to my blog
  3. Full-text search: this is very very useful when needed
  4. Social Discovery: Search that niche website / app on Pinboard. It shows lots of other people who found that same thing as interesting. We can then follow them and subscribe to their favourites as RSS feed.
blakewatson3 years ago

I’ve been a Pinboard customer since 2010 and I subscribed to the archival service several years. But archival seems to have stopped on my account. I think I emailed once but never received a reply (which I’ve heard is common). I love the philosophy of Pinboard and I also like Maciej. That said I recently decided to roll my own bookmarks tool with Wayback Machine archival capability.

https://github.com/blakewatson/bookmarks

eitland3 years ago

Archival hasn't been working for months for me and nobody answers the mails (I've tried three times over the last year or so) so as much as I like pinboard.in at the moment I am looking for something else

klenwell3 years ago

I use the API to send myself a daily email with a combination of random and anniversary bookmarks:

https://github.com/klenwell/pinprick

I find it a good way to keep in touch with past bookmarks and do some light maintenance.

AareyBaba3 years ago

Maciej has a 'random' bookmarklet you can drag to your browser toolbar. See https://pinboard.in/howto/

tclancy3 years ago

Same. Having imported my delicious bookmarks dating back to 2005 or so, I have a fairly large set of links that I try to tag consistently. I don't actually read a ton of them, but being able to full-text search or filter by combining tags makes it really useful for digging up things I barely remember coming across.

skinnymuch3 years ago

Archiving can’t do pages that need authentication. Which are frequently the most important for me. Either way the archiving does not work very well.

I have over 30K bookmarks and add multiple hundreds a month.

some_furry3 years ago

I love Pinboard. It has all the features I'd expect from a bookmarking service, but nothing superfluous. There's no upsell. There's no advertisement or JavaScript bloat.

Part of the reason for Pinboard's success is the lack of VC pressure for growth. I'm happy to keep paying for Pinboard indefinitely.

jng3 years ago

I use pinboard as well. Early user of del.icio.us, I exported it all to pinboard and paid a one-time lifetime fee. Too many old links are dead, but that's the nature of the web, and I hope waybackmachine can help with some of them (I never paid for the full-text-archive feature of pinboard, it would have been a good idea but it's too late now). Sometimes it definitely helps me find some old highlights that still lurk in a shiny way in my mind.

windexh8er3 years ago

Pinboard is phenomenal. I used to keep all my links in Simplenote but Pinboard is far superior for a number of the reasons listed here already. I may only search through it for something once a week but I find I tag things much more thoroughly in Pinboard than anything else I've used.

jnovek3 years ago

I just became a Pinboard customer a few months ago!

I picked Pinboard because the UI is simple but functional. No 30mb blob of JavaScript. It pairs well with todo.txt… now I just need a simple Dropbox-based notes app to complete the trio.

robterrell3 years ago

I also continue to use Pinboard, for much the same reasons. Since 2010! I don't use the social features but it's nice to have a tool that's been constant and reliable for over a decade.

ghaff3 years ago

The same. I started using it after Magnolia died. I used to do link blog posts via a script that used the API but stopped doing that at one point.

gammarator3 years ago

14k bookmarks in Pinboard for me! Major use case is helping me close tabs, but I search for old stuff with some frequency.

Semiapies3 years ago

It's a great service.

pomatic3 years ago

My incredibly unsophisticated, but surprisingly effective approach, is to share by email with myself (e.g. mail to myname+bookmark@mydomain.com).

Mail rules can then file them, I can add any relevant notes or hashtags to the mail body at the time I share the link, and the chronological ordering is helpful. Imap search is usually 'good enough' to turn up a half-remembered link or article.

I have been meaning to add an imap script to complement this with something like a simplepage archive, but have never got round to it.

icy3 years ago

Hah, you might like my project https://forlater.email. :)

nso3 years ago

Took me a while to parse the name, forlater is a verb meaning "leaving" in Norwegian. "Jeg forlater deg" = "I am leaving you"

jfk133 years ago

Hah, to me it looked like an ASCII-fied version of the Swedish word verb meaning "forgive".

"Jag förlåter dig" = "I forgive you".

oska3 years ago

This interesting variation might explain why the Swedes so easily forgave the Norwegians for leaving (in 1905)

nso3 years ago

Forlater means the same in Norwegian as well. Not having been back to Norway for years due to COVID I guess I'm getting a bit rusty and missed that one :p

aizatto3 years ago

This is a really cool idea!

edit: feature/request

Scenario, if I save a link from HackerNews, I like to save the submission of it as well. I wonder if I send a HackerNews link to forlater.email; it can parse the article and remind me I got it from HackerNews.

For example, I'd submit "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31852384" and in the email, it'd contain:

1. HackerNews link (so i can review the comments as well)

2. Original article link and content

food for thought, but love your product idea

icy3 years ago

I don’t see why not—this seems easy enough. And thanks for checking it out! :)

videogreg933 years ago

For the record, just tried this with my protonmail and the response went straight to spam.

throwaway232343 years ago

small critical comment, if btc is not preferred, remove the option, or don't say that. That may be meaningful to you, but not to anyone else.

joebob423 years ago

It was meaningful to me. To me it meant "the other options are better for me, but I'll take payment in btc if that's the best option for you. Here's the link for that"

Not sure what the harm is?

LanternLight833 years ago

I like this, and will be changing my mail situation in the near future, when I might take some inspiration c:

blaydator3 years ago

Email rocks for this. I have developed an app to email myself in one click : https://boomerang-app.io

moozeek3 years ago

Thank you for making Boomerang. I use it all the time on my tablet and phone.

MattieTK3 years ago

I dropped pinboard.in recently. The interface hasn't had improvements in years, the extensions are all third party, and the API if you wanted to build your own is pretty limiting. The mobile interface is pretty poor too.

I'm now moved over the Raindrop.io[1], which is another solo-developer outfit, but has had a lot of work put into it. It does all the same stuff Pinboard does (including page archiving but beside the social and public directory things... which nobody uses), but has a bunch of additional features. It has a much more complete API, a well maintained extension, and mobile apps! Definitely worth giving a go.

[1]: https://raindrop.io/

yokto3 years ago

I've been paying for Raindrop for a few years and its organisation capabilities are really good: tags, collections, folders, search, etc. All in a quite polished UI!

d4rkp4ttern3 years ago

I second this. Saving links for future reference is a very important part of my daily browsing, and I have found nothing better than Raindrop.

9935c101ab17a663 years ago

I’ve moved to raindrop too. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty great, and it gets pretty frequently bug fixes and feature releases.

alx__3 years ago

Agreed it's much better service, I've been really enjoying it.

One feature I recently learned was Highlights [1]

You can select a passage of text on the page, then when bookmarked, it'll save the selected text. Allows for multiple highlights. And then visiting the page in the future those texts clips will then be highlighted again.

[1] https://help.raindrop.io/highlights/

janniks3 years ago

Just here to +1 Raindrop. I’m crazy happy with it. 2y after starting paying for it atm

ecliptik3 years ago

I use Raindrop.io and have it hooked up to NewsBlur and ArchiveBox as secondary backups [1].

This way whenever something is bookmarked it's saved in Newsblur and published to Dropbox, which ArchiveBox picks up every hour and saves a local copy and to archive.org.

1. https://www.ecliptik.com/bookmarking-with-raindrop/

megaman8213 years ago

I also use Raindrop.io. It is the nicest looking of the bookmarking services.

kristofferR3 years ago

That's really neat, I think I'm gonna implement that ArchiveBox solution myself. Thanks!

gutta-percha3 years ago

+1 for Raindrop.io, it works very well.

night-rider3 years ago

Pinboard is still quite active. If you need proof just go to /recent which is a live firehose and interesting to see what people are bookmarking. I use Pinboard and regularly export my bookmarks incase their servers are hacked/wiped/corrupted.

benrapscallion3 years ago

As a paying customer, I would not recommend pinboard. Just look at some recent discussions on HN. It has been abandonware for years now.

laveer3 years ago

I switched from Pinboard to Raindrop after not getting a response to pinboard support emails. I hope Pinboard’s creator is okay.

tsp3 years ago

Same for me. Got an answer to my support requests months later. I left long time ago (to Raindrop).

sleepyhead3 years ago

Probably busy tweeting

+1
mortenjorck3 years ago
benrapscallion3 years ago

Likewise. I switched to Raindrop.io.

mikestew3 years ago

It has been abandonware for years now

I pay to keep the servers running, not so I can have something new and shiny every month. If it somehow quits doing what pinboard does, then I'll look at alternatives.

benrapscallion3 years ago

Well, the archiving hasn’t been working.

incanus773 years ago

Paying customer ~4 years here (prior use for years). Happy with it. Use it for extensive private bookmarking.

rglullis3 years ago

Is it failing for you? Would you switch to some other alternative?

santoshalper3 years ago

Exactly, I hate the idea that software has to be constantly updated. That's how we end up with so many bloated messes that started out simple (cough dropbox cough). Pinboard is simple, and for my needs at least, perfect. If he kept it in maintenance mode forever, I'd be fine with that.

+1
warmwaffles3 years ago
paulcole3 years ago

Part of it is definitely that Pinboard as a service (feels to be at least) is in "maintenance mode" with minimal support. But what new features does a bookmarking service need?

Part of it is also that tech bros are upset that Maciej didn't go full-coinbase and is instead pretty active socially/politically.

I'm happy to keep using it and paying for it. Works fine for my needs.

benrapscallion3 years ago

I am not a techbro (not from a tech field) and I don’t want new features, only that the ones it has not stop working. Especially when I am paying for it.

ghaff3 years ago

That actually reminds me I haven't done an export in a looong time and I should.

I was using Magnolia before Pinboard and it went down permanently. Fortunately, at the time, I was doing link blog posts once or twice a week so I was able to recover most of my links with a bit of work.

Crontab3 years ago

I like Pinboard and its creator but he has been leaving me with the impression that it is no longer a priority for him.

nafizh3 years ago

Paying customer. Really happy with it. None of the other options compare in terms of functionality and minimalism.

Eddy_Viscosity23 years ago

I use Zotero for this now. I have a bunch of sub-collections (e.g. technical, interesting, fitness, etc.) and when I see a webpage I like I use the plug-in to save to Zotero. Better than a bookmark because it also saves a snapshot of the webpage, and, I can easily cite it if I'm writing a document.

https://www.zotero.org/

sundarurfriend3 years ago

Same. I don't even use the citation features of Zotero, it's purely a bookmark manager for me. I can choose whether to save the page with or without a snapshot, use both folders and tags for organization, add notes if I want to, and on supported sites (like Github), get an automatic bookmark summary too.

The interface took a bit of getting used to, but I learned some of the shortcuts, installed Zutilo [1], and ultimately just accepted the fact that I'll have to use the mouse for some things, as everything else about the program makes it worth it.

[1] https://github.com/wshanks/Zutilo

Eddy_Viscosity23 years ago

I hadn't heard of zutilo, I will check it out, thanks.

humanistbot3 years ago

+1 for Zotero. If you are writing academic or technical documents and need to cite the documents you save in a standard format, it is a life saver.

TheCowboy3 years ago

Do you or anyone else have thoughts on if Zotero would be too much for someone who doesn't need to write papers or cite documents? A large component of my day-to-day work is doing a lot of research and managing it for the duration of the project.

Eddy_Viscosity23 years ago

I highly recommend it, even for this use case. It takes a bit to get used to in how it works and setting so that it works well for your given workflow. For example, I'm a latex user so I had to add extensions to zotero so it can output to bibtex. But again, it wasn't that bad. Once its set up and you used it a few times, it easy and super useful.

I use it not only for web bookmarks, but as my main 'library' for all my documents. Even random scanned docs or even funny gifs I will store in zotero because I can tag them and put in notes so they are easy to find later.

+1
throwoutway3 years ago
ryankshaw3 years ago

I have the pocket extension installed in chrome. Not so much because I actually refer back to the things I have added to it but so that when I have wayyyy too many tabs open I can click the "add to pocket" button on a few of them and not agonize about closing them.

jrochkind13 years ago

Do you pay for pocket or use the free tier? I hadn't heard of pocket before, but am looking at it... it's not clear to me what is limited in free tier/what the difference is. "Permanent library of everything you’ve saved" is listed as a feature of only the premium paid tier, leading me to wonder if that means your saved things disappear from the free tier after a certain amount of time?

gxqoz3 years ago

I pay for the premium tier. I've been disappointed by their promises about content being retained forever. There's a big caveat that they don't actually keep paywalled content forever. This is annoying because I might save something that's not paywalled right now, highlight it, then come back a year later and I can't get to my highlights anymore. And they've been extremely unreliable in being able to retrieve all of my content from searching. Articles I'm positive I've saved routinely don't appear in my searches. There's some sort of caching going on where they don't include articles I haven't recently interacted with and they haven't been able to fix it for 3+ years. I really want to like Pocket but they just fail in this important use case for me.

youngian3 years ago

Exact same, Pocket is so close to being the perfect service and yet so far. I have a huge archive and their search is just terrible. I will have a specific keyword from an article I know I have in there, and yet all I get from their results is utterly irrelevant articles. Making it worse, you can't filter the search results to, say, your Favorites, so I have to sift through all the random crap in my full archive.

I ask for that great article about leaded gasoline (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-most-important-scient...) and Pocket gives me an article about Rebecca Black instead (https://www.theawl.com/2011/03/arms-so-freezy-rebecca-blacks...).

gxqoz3 years ago

Yeah I really hate this. And they've had just stupidly obvious bugs to fix for so long. For instance, in the web client their logic for handling quotes is broken. So you literally can't search for an "exact match" (even though Pocket anyway sucks at exact matches), you just get """"my search term"""" with 4 quotes that returns either 0 or 1000 results. I can't fathom how this particular bug could be more than a one-line fix in the HTML escape logic.

cygn3 years ago

same. Have a premium account but their search doesn't work properly. At one point I asked their support and they switched my account from premium to non-premium, asked me to pay for another premium account (which they then refunded). Then it was working properly for some months, but now it's having problems again. So annoying...

probotect0r3 years ago

I use the free tier, didn't even know they had a paid tier, and I have had nothing disappear.

Edit: They have more details here: https://help.getpocket.com/article/929-pocket-premium-perman...

Permanent library means they make copies of the articles and links that you save, so they are available even if the original goes down.

pbhjpbhj3 years ago

Copying, and making available for money, someone else's webpage sounds a lot like copyright infringement?

lategloriousgnu3 years ago

If they were to make the copy available for everyone through their own syndicator then sure, but they don't. The "copy" is only available for the original reader, who had legitimate access to the original anyway.

Under copyright, you're allowed to make full copies of works which you have legitimate access to, as long as you don't distribute them to others.

https://copyright.unimelb.edu.au/shared/using-copyright-mate...

To me, what Pocket is offering is like a warehouse where you can take books which you already own, and they're charging you for the warehouse space.

Doesn't sound like anything to do with copyright to me.

Myrmornis3 years ago

I've used Pocket for years and recently started paying for it because I thought I would like to use the indexing + search feature.

dkarl3 years ago

Same here, but I've started tagging certain kinds of links. I haven't used the tags much, except to look up recipes, so it remains to be seen how much mileage I'll get out of the tages, but I do like using Pocket as a kind of reading queue to help keep my tabs tidy.

greenie_beans3 years ago

same, and i can download the articles on my ereader

coastflow3 years ago

I use Evernote. It's the last "killer feature" of the platform. The software is too slow and clunky for taking notes (OneNote or Apple's stock Notes app are far better for this), even after the somewhat-recent update that improved performance, but it succeeds at saving webpages where other services fail. I tried to switch to OneNote's web clipper, but too often it could only save a link instead of clipping the page. Evernote also works on iOS.

There was an interesting comment on r/Evernote by a former employee who worked there about why the clipper works so well (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Evernote/comments/fbf8an/comment/fj...), based on acquisitions of other companies, custom code for certain websites, and a willingness to test websites where clipping doesn't work and (eventually) fix them.

However, there are issues with clipping on desktop Safari (occasionally there are bugs for periods of time, until fixes are implemented in an update), and sometimes clipping does break for certain websites (though this eventually gets fixed). I also find searching can take effort to find specific past web clips, though I'm not sure if the services is actually worse than before.

Web clipping is the last reason I'm staying with Evernote, writing as a user who has paid money in an attempt to migrate notes to another service (then finding that the other service was inadequate for web clipping).

RandomWorker3 years ago

Totally agree, application is weak. Don't understand the new listing and task management features. It just seems like a distraction.. why not have a proper table editor before you start adding new features. Also, the time to startup should be much shorter. I suggest they make a simple version of the tool, just list on the left (simplify the notebooks, and tags, etc). Get rid of the homepage. However, I just can't leave that clipper.

Even the simple fact that you can screenshot a part of the screen, annotate it, a toss it on the heap is so awesome. I don't worry about space, I don't worry about finding it. Search is really great on Evernote even picks up the text in images way..... before any tool was doing that.

Also, you can actually save the content of a page to a note (not just a link with an avatar). This is great for recipes that once you found it, you can never seem to find it ever again on google. Having a copy of that particular recipe with the right mix of ingredients I still have laying around. PERFECT!

pqs3 years ago

Tasks might seem a distraction to you but they have simplified my life a lot. They are central to my workflow and I'm glad they introduced them.

anotherman5543 years ago

I use Evernote as well. But for some stuff I'd rather be encrypted I find Joplin is a good open source Evernote alternative that lets you encrypt entire notebooks. Joplin's web clipper seems to work fine on Desktop though I've never tried it on mobile.

pqs3 years ago

On my 4 year old Windows 10 ThinkPad laptop it now works very fast. I have 20k notes. At the beginning it was very clunky, now it works very well. At least this is my experience.

twblalock3 years ago

I've pretty much stopped using bookmarks.

I used to have a large amount of bookmarks, carefully sorted into folders. I didn't use most of them on a regular basis, and the links broke over time. The end result was a bunch of broken bookmarks.

The combination of autocomplete, history, and web searches seems good enough to find anything I want.

chrisan3 years ago

Ya, the only bookmarks I use these days are the ones in Firefox's bookmark toolbar which are more there for quick access purposes than saving interesting articles

klausjensen3 years ago

I use Pinboard - and I always tag my bookmarks. Then I usually never look at them again.

MollyRealized3 years ago

I suggest you don't. He's idlewords on this board and his comments speak for him (i.e. mocking his customers) -- he's effectively abandoned any work on Pinboard, including simple requests from paid users (of things as laid out instructions for the board), as well as ignoring error reports, etc.

bhaney3 years ago

I just leave the tab open forever

bravasaurus3 years ago

This is how I discovered Safari on iOS has a hard limit of 500 open tabs. Rather horrifyingly, when you try to open tab number 501, it asks if you want to close all open tabs.

TillE3 years ago

It's strange to me that browsers - both desktop and mobile - aren't more aggressive about "paging out" unused tabs. I end up just restarting Firefox now and then when I'm not ready to do a full cleanup.

Even with the fancy mobile interface you really just need to store a thumbnail (plus the URL and title) for each tab, and even an older iPhone should have little trouble scrolling through thousands of tiny images.

pbhjpbhj3 years ago

Firefox mobile does, it puts things behind an "inactive tabs" title on the tabs page.

In Chrome I use a tab suspender extension, in part because there was a bug that bit me alot where it would leak memory of you leave a tab active with a highlight. Don't know if the bug is fixed yet. Tab suspending makes my Surface Pro run better; seems like it shouldn't be needed.

hhh3 years ago

I haven't ever had issues with hundreds of tabs on iOS. It just works for me.

zaphodq423 years ago

one of best comment I have read.

stoicjumbotron3 years ago

I have 236 tabs open in Firefox right now :(

jrochkind13 years ago

same

bhub3 years ago

I used to use pinboard[1] but since I started dicking around with self hosting I use Wallabag[2] for “read it later” articles and linkding [0] for saving links that I want to refer to later. Linkding is pretty much a self hosted pinboard

[0] https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

[1] http://pinboard.in/

[2] https://www.wallabag.it/en

platz3 years ago

I also used to use pinboard. I created a clone of the basics called Espial and enjoy that it serves my huge collection a bit faster when filtering:

https://github.com/jonschoning/espial

jhot3 years ago

Linkding is my current favorite self-hosted solution in this genre. Used Pocket for a long time but like the tagging and minimal looks of linkding better.

cturtle3 years ago

This gave me the motivation to finally setup linkding on my pi. Took all of 20 minutes and I’m absolutely loving it, thank you!

dawnerd3 years ago

Wallabag is pretty great, the chrome extension is nice too.

bhub3 years ago

The iOS app scrolls to where you stopped reading last. This sealed the deal for me over raindrop.

idealmedtech3 years ago

When I find incredible in depth content that I plan to read later, my first step is always to drop it into archive.org, and then to bookmark the original link. That way if you're perusing later on and some links have died or been moved, you can always recover the content you want. Plus, it's archived for everyone else on the Internet which is a net benefit.

I donate to them yearly for being such a crucial piece of Internet infrastructure (in the historical, not literal, sense)

thearrow3 years ago

Just switched from https://pinboard.in to https://raindrop.io for this the other day. Migration went smoothly and so far the product is a bit nicer.

and03 years ago

The suggested tags is what I'm really interested in, but don't want to pay extra for it. It'd be nice if a Chrome extension (since my bookmarks are sync'd there anyway) handled this with a nicer display but used the existing bookmarks.

For example, a tag of the subreddit would be excellent for all my recent /r/unixporn inspiration saves. Managing bookmarks is a hassle and why I usually don't bother or throw them into a "Misc" folder.

depingus3 years ago

https://www.xbrowsersync.org/

Locally encrypted, open source, free with no ads or can be self-hosted. And most importantly, its not tied to any particular browser. With xBrowserSync for bookmarks and Bitwarden for passwords, I can browser hop as much as I want.

encryptluks23 years ago

I recall in the past lots of people reporting issues with their bookmarks going missing with xBrowserSync. It also hasn't been updated in quite some time. My biggest issue, is it appeared to primarily integrate with the browsers bookmark manager... and once you had thousands of bookmarks in the browser bookmark manager, it started lagging. I prefer something with a native local service to search and manage bookmarks, like Shiori.. but I don't like Shiori all that much either.

depingus3 years ago

I've been using xBrowserSync for over 2 years to sync 4 devices without issue. I do occasionally export my bookmarks for backup, but haven't had to use it. I switched after losing years of bookmarks to a Firefox sync issue. One of the best things about xBrowserSync (for me) turned out to be its workflow. I can't imagine going back to bookmarking in nested folders. Using tags with search is just so much better.

encryptluks23 years ago

Thanks. I'll give it another go, although I was hoping for something that synced to markdown files.

injvstice3 years ago

I use it as well, the UI is a little cheesy and windows XPish (at least to my eyes). Maybe there is a technical limitation preventing it from inheriting the browser theme.

But so far, it's worked ok.

TimC1234563 years ago

I’m using Safari on macOS and iOS as my primary browsers. If I find something worth bookmarking, I add it to Reading List (the keyboard shortcut is muscle memory by now) which gives me a searchable list of offline—readable sites synced across all my devices. I’ve also found the History search really great at quickly allowing me to solve the “what was that ZFS HOWTO was looking at last week?” type of situations.

I, too, am (was?) a long-time paying Pinboard user, but Reading List is just so much less friction. I found myself never going back to look through my Pinboard bookmarks.

Reading List “just works.”

segu3 years ago

Exactly, I think friction is critical in this case. Bookmarks and native reading lists definitely have an edge with that. What you say about 'never going back' to bookmarked items is interesting, I've been feeling the same and despite trying many solutions I still have to find a tool that would help me classify, fill missing tags etc. to really organize my knowledge base better. I need something platform independent tho

jxramos3 years ago

so what is the reading list feature exactly, I was going to post to AskDifferent what's the deal with that feature and what does it offer precisely. I had stuff showing up in my list but they all got added there accidentally.

Does Safari download a static version of each page and caches it somewhere on disk and indexes it somewhere in the browser for you?

TimC1234563 years ago
fauigerzigerk3 years ago

>Reading List “just works.”

Offline reading doesn't always work. On the Mac I have to use the "save offline" menu. On iOS I haven't been able to find out when or why it does or doesn't work offline.

TimC1234563 years ago

While it’s not on by default, there’s a Safari preference you can enable to save offline automatically: Safari > Preferences, click Advanced, then select “Save articles for offline reading automatically.”

(Source: https://support.apple.com/guide/safari/keep-a-reading-list-s...)

fauigerzigerk3 years ago

Thanks, that's good to know. Interestingly, iOS has that setting as well but it doesn't work reliably.

KolenCh3 years ago

I use the Pocket free tier.

Then I use the web export function there to export it to xml.

I wrote a script that would read that xml and pull (and if not available, fall back to archive.org) and cache (so only new bookmarks are downloaded) the sites, and built an offline version for archival and searching.

ews3 years ago

I switched from pinboard.in / del.icio.us (the social aspect was becoming less and less important) to a workflow based on braintool (https://braintool.org/) and org-mode TODO and tags, it completely changed the way I work with bookmarks now.

tconfrey3 years ago

Hey this is great to hear @ews (BrainTool dev here). FWIW WRT this conversation, my long term hope for BrainTool is to generate a thriving ecosystem of shared curated topic trees, each one a little summary of a corner of the internet.

ews3 years ago

that's awesome, I wanted to publicly recognize your work, the tool is amazing, particularly for org-mode users (which is another incredible tool btw) - I appreciate your use of plain text as storage

steve_adams_863 years ago

I use https://mymind.com

It's also a good dumping ground for any kind of interesting snippet, image, or whatever I find interesting. There are some neat little features for occasionally sorting through your "mind" and discarding unused information.

It's not free, but I don't mind because the UI happens to work well for me. It's thoughtful, well-crafted, and I'm happy to support them.

d4rkp4ttern3 years ago

Looks interesting but has bad reviews on iOS App Store

steve_adams_863 years ago

I can’t give an opinion on the iOS experience. It really could be bad. What I love is the web experience, and it’s where I tend to use a screen so it works well for me.

FireInsight3 years ago

This seems really good for me but it requires a google or apple account which is the only reason why I wont be switching to it.

obaid3 years ago

I have been looking into this lately as well. My problem is that even if I visit back those pages, I don't remember the context of why I bookmarked it.

I have been toying with a chrome extension that enables me to add "annotations" to these pages and it helps me find websites based on my note search. It's far from perfect but I realized that I remember my notes / thoughts more than the website url or name.

kirubakaran3 years ago

https://histre.com/ lets you add notes and highlights to your bookmarks, if that's what you're looking for. Disclosure: I'm working on it.

obaid3 years ago

Neat. I will check it out!

pbhjpbhj3 years ago

In Firefox I heavily used tags, "tags are great, mini notes, super useful", but they're missing from Brave, Chrome, etc.

mr-karan3 years ago

Yup, I use a self hosted version of [1]

[1]: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

jpeeler3 years ago

This is the one I'm leaning towards using as well. (Though https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori was a close second.)

Linkding uses SQLite as the database, which for self-hosting is such a huge win. It doesn't do much in the way of local archiving, but the interface looks so incredibly clean.

I haven't tried this yet, but since I have "HTTP Shortcuts" (wonderful Android app) already installed I really appreciated the ability to be able to send bookmarks from my phone easily without installing anything new:

https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding/blob/ebbf0022bc44bf...

Aachen3 years ago

Why give that link a number?

bueno3 years ago

I recently launched an iOS app that may be relevant here!

Unlike other apps that save bookmarks that stay unread forever, Ephemera sets a deadline that the bookmark must be read by. Miss the deadline, and that bookmark is gone.

https://deadpan.io/ephemera/

I’d love for the hacker news community to check it out!

hcarrega3 years ago

Can I import my ff bookmarks to it?

simonw3 years ago

I use Pocket, then I have my own tool that exports my data from Pocket to SQLite: https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite

gxqoz3 years ago

Awesome, I've been looking for something like this forever! I use Pocket a ton and make lots of highlights. But its search and archive features have been practically unusable for 3 years for me despite frequent complaints to support.

gxqoz3 years ago

Bummer, though, since it looks like Pocket's API doesn't export the highlights or any metadata about them. Unless it's hidden in the "fts" or whatever that is.

jimmySixDOF3 years ago

Also using Raindrop.io - it works great with Make integrations and the dev responds to issues. Good to sync between multiple browsers on multiple devices.

eirikvaa3 years ago

Came to mention Raindrop.io - great service.

eddyg3 years ago

Came here to say the same. I'm also a very satisfied raindrop.io user. Native Safari integration for both macOS and iOS is a huge plus, and the friction is low to put bookmarks into categories and apply tags when saving them.

askafriend3 years ago

I stopped because I realized it was hoarding-behavior more than anything meaningful or productive.

I still do it occasionally, but I'm not longer obsessive about it the way I might have been in the past.

nostromo3 years ago

Apple Notes is where I put urls along with just about everything else.

The one and only thing I miss about Delicious is that it was great to see what other people were saving under a specific tag or topic.

akrymski3 years ago

I do the same, but search really sucks.

I miss Delicious, and tag based org.

dotcoma3 years ago

What about… http://pinboard.in/

?

eitland3 years ago

Archiving stopped working months ago and no one answers the support mail.

kragen3 years ago

I use a text file in Git with one URL per line with commentary following the URL, with hashtags in the line. This makes text search through the comments really easy (especially including isearch in Emacs) but doesn't provide archival, thumbnailing, or full-text search of page contents. I don't have the collaboratively suggested tags from del.icio.us but what I miss more is the feed of other people's linkblogs.

Each day has a blank line and a "links for 02022-06-23:" header beginning it.

joshu3 years ago

FWIW this is how I saved URLs originally; when it got unmaneagable I built muxway and then del.icio.us. The notes became tags as they were often a single word. Hash because it was a comment.

    http://the.url/ #notes
    http://another.url/
    http://third.url/ #word
kragen3 years ago

Interesting, did factoryjoe know that when he proposed hashtags for Twitter? There weren't hash marks in the del.icio.us interface but I don't remember if muxway had them or not.

I still have an XML dump of my del.icio.us bookmarks that I haven't merged in. The linkrot rate is pretty high.

chazeon3 years ago

I use self-hosted [linkace][1]. It is similar to Shaarli but has a little nicer interface.

[1]: https://www.linkace.org/

capdeck3 years ago

Awesome alternative. I've been using Shaarli for a very long time. Very stable, always works, everywhere works. Doesn't look fancy, but reliability is off the charts.

jazzyjackson3 years ago

I've had too many bookmarks go offline a few years after the fact, so now I just print anything interesting to PDF (I use safari's "Share" button and send it to DEVONthink, two clicks and I have a permenant archive sorted into categories.)

Arubis3 years ago

I use and love Pinboard, plus the Instapaper-like read-it-later integration Paperback (readpaperback.com) set as my home page in my mobile browser. It’s a great combo.

philistine3 years ago

I use Pocket to send pages to my RSS reader.

What I mean by that is if I see a page I want to read later, I need to have it in NetNewsWire to read it; otherwise I never read them. So I subscribe to my Pocket account’s RSS feed, so whenever I bookmark something in Pocket, it’s ready to be started in NetNewsWire whenever I get to reading my feeds.

I’m big on having one destination for all the things I follow. I follow YouTube accounts through RSS as well.

pro_zac3 years ago

This is great! I use Feedly for RSS but didn't realize I could subscribe to my own Pocket feed.

pacifika3 years ago

I use Pocket, and Alfread on top of that. Will switch out pocket for instapaper though, because Pocket cannot seem to download articles in the background, so when I'm reading on unreliable connections the articles are never there.

nikivi3 years ago

My bookmarking service is Alfred workflow I wrote: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/alfred-my-mind

It searches through links in my wiki: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge

have_faith3 years ago

I'd rather not use a 3rd party service. All I really need is the bookmarking UX already built into the browser but behind the scenes it captures the contents of the link (locally) and stores it against the bookmark. Bonus points if it asks where I want the bookmarks and their snapshots to be stored/synced to.

Does such a plugin exist?

aquajet3 years ago

I've been working on a solution to this: https://diva.so mainly cause I had the same issue.

It's a third-party service unfortunately, but it can index the contents of your bookmarks + other sources to let you search them. I haven't got it to work locally yet since the search needs a decently large server to work (I want to use a LLM eventually) but I do encrypt all data. I don't know how it compares to similar systems linked here, but I'm down to try to help you out to set it up in a way to your liking.

kkfx3 years ago

I generally archive as pdf ONLY things really interesting me, in org-mode/org-roam managed notes as org-attachments, most other links are just noted with a not-that-good but the best I found combo:

- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-as-org-m... and https://github.com/kuanyui/copy-as-org-mode

- https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html and https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/promnesia/

- https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html and https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasp

The first to quickly copy text from html, the second to see if something is already noted, the third to quickly archive the bookmark. In the past I've used Zotero witch works automatically VERY well (and on deduplicated storage does not consume so much disk space) but since it's a kind of walled-garden in the sense I can't really integrate it in anything else I decide to have a bit less features but hyper-superior integration with org-mode.

jamifsud3 years ago

I’ve tried just about every app in the space (some great tools listed in this thread) and haven’t found one that works for me, so I’m building one!

My workflow is save for later focused (I tend to save content to read / learn from vs bookmark resources to visit) and now days I’m collecting content in so many different forms (podcasts, video, newsletters, etc). I’ve found that nobody has native support for every content form I save and it’s been a big pain point. We're focusing on nailing native support for all content types / sources and building tools to help you manage the forever growing list of content that can sometimes happen when your library grows!

It’s called Upnext (https://www.getupnext.com), happy to share invites with HNers in search of a tool in this space, email in profile!

niqdev3 years ago

Hi,

these are similar threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22158218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105561

I personally ended up building my own solution with the following requirements * easy to export or convert later e.g. json * simple to build/maintain e.g. github action + hugo * easy to access from the phone e.g. telegram

These are my bookmarks https://myawesome.dev and this is the template https://github.com/my-awesome/my-awesome-template

it's not perfect but it cover my needs ;-)

FunnyBadger3 years ago

The internet is far too "entropic" to trust bookmarks alone. This has been a clear failing of the web since the 1990s.

I've literally been downloading pages since then to have a local image. I've written various native code tools to extract text, index that and then markup the files with keywords and then create a local search engine back.

SO MUCH is shadow-edited, deleted or lost. It's foolish to rely on ANYTHING online for more than a year or even less. If it matters you must have a full archive.

When PDFs are referenced (e.g. scientific papers - I have 1000s of COVID papers), I download those and index them.

This is also why I never rely on e-books - I order a hard copy because in 20-100 years, it will ONLY be the paper version that will still be around.

xenodium3 years ago

https://plainorg.com (iOS/share sheet from Safari) - I authored this one.

https://braintool.org (Chrome)

Both powered by a plain text stores.

BlackForestBoy3 years ago

I found bookmarking tools often lacking a more holistic integration into research workflows that are not just about saving things, but also taking notes.

We’ve developed Memex to solve for that. It’s an offline first extension for bookmarking and annotating websites, pdfs and youtube videos. Also you can collaboratively curate and discuss them, and it has a mobile app to save and annotate websites. It’s availabe for Chrome/Brave and Firefox (memex.garden)

3min Demo: https://links.memex.garden/3mindemo

stoicjumbotron3 years ago

Been using Memex since the old UI, (don't remember the version) and I would highly recommend this.

jandrusk3 years ago

I use Slack as my bookmark manager ;) Have my own personal Slack workspace where I have various channels for certain types of bookmarks(coding/emacs/history,etc). On my Debian box at home I have weechat with the weeslack plugin where my weechat instance runs in a tmux session 24X7 and I log everything locally to disk. That way I can just open up the Slack log for a given channel to find a specific bookmark in Emacs via search/regex search. Have Slack clients at work, mobile, and home, so it seems to work pretty good for me.

eibhinn3 years ago

Kinda/sorta. I use https://dynalist.io as my outliner. And it has browser clipper plugins that in their simplest use snapshot the title/url of the page you're on. So I often clip urls into there.

But it as a tool is much broader. I use it as my GTD inbox, and for task management, and other notes. The fact that I can simply search for pages that I've clipped (including adding #tags to them, or grouping them) is a lovely subset of what I use it for.

onassar3 years ago

Will use this as an opportunity to share something I built called Bookee: https://onassar.github.io/extensions/bookee/

It's a Chrome Extension that let's me quickly search through my Chrome Bookmarks. It's got plenty of hotkeys, and I use it 20+ times a day.

Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NxHfxQC.jpg

dewey3 years ago

I realized that I never go back to my bookmarks and if I really wanted to find something again I usually am able to. I came to the same realization with hoarding movies / tv shows.

imiric3 years ago

As a counterpoint, I don't go to my bookmarks often, but when I do, it's invaluable, and I'd feel lost without them.

Especially with tags, I can quickly find a number of things I find/found interesting just by using one or two tags.

I agree about hoarding media, though. But I still like to have metadata on content I want to watch, and content I've watched and what I thought about it.

hn_version_00233 years ago

I've also come to this realization. It was one of the more freeing realizations I've had, along with "I don't have to save every email I've ever received for all time".

The weight off my mind from skipping the maintenance, care, and feeding of various digital libraries is considerable, and I recommend it to stressed out friends & family.

bombcar3 years ago

The only bookmarks I use are to particular pages on particular systems that I need to reference relatively often and navigating to them is annoying.

Otherwise, my bookmarks are the history in the browser - "ne" is hacker news, "yo" is YouTube, etc.

jeffwask3 years ago

This is the state I am rapidly approaching. Outside of Toolbar quick access stuff I find I always search or it pops up in history suggestions before I search

baal80spam3 years ago

This is great until you need to reinstall the OS/browser and suddenly everything you typed in the omnibar is gone.

jeffwask3 years ago

yeah but I also feel like the occasional purge isn't the worst thing

helipad3 years ago

I pay for Pinboard with archiving, in fact my 5 year archiving was about to expire to paid for 10 years.

The entropy of links is staggering. I'm glad to have archives of some of the oldest links.

thefourthchime3 years ago

I tweet it. There’s always an option to tweet anything anywhere.

Nobody reads my Twitter except me, so it works fine.

aantix3 years ago

I developed a product, Critical Context. Shared bookmarking and search for software teams.

You share a document with your team. E.g. "best cloud vendors".

Then for that document, each team member installs a bookmarklet, and collectively contributes to the research by submitting bookmarks, search queries, and screen shots.

Helpful if your team is collectively researching vendors, frameworks, etc.

Works well for my individual needs too.

https://critical.cx/

asaddhamani3 years ago

I made my own [0][1] that saves archives of the pages bookmarked, stores the browsing history, open tabs, and more. I've open sourced it but the open source code on GitHub is a bit out of date.

[0] https://www.crestify.com [1] https://www.github.com/dhamaniasad/crestify

manmal3 years ago

I use pinboard.in, 99,9% via either the iOS & macOS app „Pins“. This is mainly something that buys me peace of mind, in case the browser history fails me.

dangerard3 years ago

I built a little chrome extension[0] that allows you to like and share links as you are browsing the web. It was originally intended to be kind of like Digg, but most people just use it to bookmark.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/poster/heklcccecmo...

Adraghast3 years ago

I’ve been using Raindrop.io for this. (Not affiliated.)

SoftTalker3 years ago

I used to use instapaper quite a bit, but when I figured out that I almost never went back and read any of my saved links, I stopped.

If I'm not interested enough to read the link now, I almost certainly am not going to read it later.

Sort of the same reason I don't take photos anymore. I never go back and look at them, so it's just a waste of time and a distraction from being really present in the moment.

gnuj33 years ago

You might change your mind about looking back at photos in 20 years and you probably gonna regret your current approach

aalpanigrahi3 years ago

Not here to spam, but we're building a really interesting product called mutter where in it's next iteration, every user can store, curate and post links into streams, which we think of as a combination of User x Topic. For example, if a user wants to curate content on React, then the user can create a stream specific to it. This stream isn't a global topic like a subreddit but something specific to a user.

The user can then curate content via both in-app "post" feature, as well as a chrome extension. Interestingly, the discovery feed will also be built in a way that it allows you re-discover content, because we end up saving a lot of content, but rarely end up revisiting them.

:) The current prototype of mutter (URL: https://mutter.ai) was built as a research exercise. We're working on totally new prototype but with a different set of designs.

lukaszkups3 years ago

Similarly to other commenters here, I would like to share my approach:

- if it's an article related to my interests and that fits for the overall contents I share on twitter - I simply tweet about it.

- if it's code-related (e.g. github repo) - I just "star" it

- if it's something else - it depends what category it is, because I have two bookmark folders in the browser: "4 later" (so that if something seems to be interesting but I don't have time right now to read it) or "saved" folder where I just put something that I would like to have bookmarked (I've also have then nested year sub-folders (as I don't bookmark THAT often that this approach wouldn't be sufficient for me)).

- if something is very important for me, I simply send an e-mail to myself with tagged content so I can easily find it through e-mail search engine later - I have a dedicated e-mail suffix for this (imagine xyz+bookmark@gmail.com) and it automatically goes archived into "bookmarks" folder instead to inbox.

johnthescott3 years ago

i utilize a similar email tagging system via gmail. tag menus in browsers are just portable bookmarklets, seeded with tag, current page and title.

small words are good. simple words are better. small simple words are best.

LMMojo3 years ago

For me, it all started with Delicious (del.icio.us) but then it got bought by Yahoo!, which added unnecessary functionality and eventually the system died, got traded, sold, wherever. Either way, it became useless.

I transferred all of my links to Diigo, which had much the same functionality, but a LOT of extras. Diigo really focuses on the extras and I felt the weren't really interested in the features I considered for Core.

I eventually realized that the guy who originally started del.icio.us was running a service called Pinboard. I checked it out, read his blog, saw how dedicated he was to providing a good service and being attentive to his customers and signed up. https://pinboard.in/ is a fantastic bookmarking service which ticks all the right boxes and doesn't try to be something it shouldn't. If you're tactical in your tagging you should be able to find your valuable links easily.

AlecSchueler3 years ago

No, I used to be super into bookmarks and a lot of the first code I wrote was to help me manage them and to discover new things from others via delicious bookmarks and things like that.

In recent years I've found that I only visit 5 out so websites with any regularity and everything else is as quick to Google for as to search my bookmarks for.

I've completely given up on bookmarks.

theandrewbailey3 years ago

Isn't HN a bookmarking service?

night-rider3 years ago

Well you could use it that way by adding stuff to your favourites. A largely unused but useful feature of HN.

quickthrower23 years ago

I do this sometimes. Enjoyable to read through it once in a while.

anyfactor3 years ago

I literally posted my last post, so I can add it to my favourites on HN.

dividedbyzero3 years ago

HN has a favorites feature?

frosted-flakes3 years ago

For posts, it's in the list of button links under the post title at the top of the discussion page. For comments, you have to click the timestamp first.

Note that favourites are public and anyone can see what you added to your list. If you don't upvote spuriously, upvotes can also function as a private favourites list.

+1
jrochkind13 years ago
maneesh3 years ago

I pay for raindrop.io. Their free version is fantastic and i recommend it

aiisjustanif3 years ago

Raindrop.io at scale did not work well for me it was a lot more upkeep and the load times were a bit much. Also, the main pain point for me was the browser extension would constantly crash and not populate my tags or folders.

creativityland3 years ago

Yes and depending on what.

- Notable things that are urgent gets emailed to myself.

- Sites and pages get bookmarked in the browser

- Notes and tasks are added directly into an extension like Notion [0] or Taskade [1] or Pocket [2] and synced to all my devices

----

[0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notion-web-clipper...

[1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/taskade-team-tasks...

[2] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-pocket/nil...

johncalvinyoung3 years ago

I still use Instapaper, though their mobile apps are not terribly useful, and very slow. Mostly I just use it to bookmark things--I read so voraciously that searching through 25 new bookmarks a day is way easier than searching through 250+ history entries a day, not to mention Chrome isn't indexing every page I've visited.

teepo3 years ago

I use an org mode capture template and a couple browser extensions. Dead simple for bookmarks and surfacing the context inside Emacs. - I have two use cases: 1. a simple bookmark I want to revisit (maybe) and 2. A bookmark with an excerpt from the page. I can copy in the material I want to capture all withe the same process.

Kerrick3 years ago

I use the bookmark feature built into my web browser, which also syncs with my smartphone. For bookmarks I want to share publicly, I just drop them onto a hand-coded HTML page on my website: https://kerricklong.com/bookmarks/

archi423 years ago

For private use: I rarely bookmark anything anymore. Lots of info is easy to find (e.g. Arch Linux Wiki) and reasonable reliable. Also my password manager has a list of all accounts with associated URLs, so I can search that.

For work I have a wider variety of information. I'm often doing Pentests, so I read up on related research a lot. Since I can't keep every minor detail in my head, I bookmark interesting things in the browser; that's then backed up, but that's about it.

As a typical tech hobby, I run a few home servers and recently got myself an "always on" machine. Now I'm looking at self hosted services my family and/or I could genuinely benefit from. Bookmark sync between my work laptops could be nice, but Yacy mentioned in the top comment is insanely attractive - indexing (+archiving?) beats bookmarking.

dbodin113 years ago

Yes. I built my own https://www.kontxt.io and hit the front page of HN not too long ago. It's a modern hybrid productivity and social bookmarking / news / knowledge aggregation service. Think social web layer with CMS and social network.

You can save the site / pdf (link or archive), engage with highlights, comments, and polls. There's privacy controls. It's searchable. Everything can be organized with tags as well as folders. You can join groups and follow people to discover shared content. Highlights can be shared natively to popular social platforms and observed with analytics. User's can also set a personal promotion with what they share as an added benefit and incentive to provide value.

lonelyasacloud3 years ago

Yes. Have used for years and pay for https://www.diigo.com/ .

As a service it doesn't appear to be being actively developed, but it is reliable, isn't too fugly and has the required functionallity (multiplatform/browser/mobile support, good search, read later, tags, highlighting, sticky notes, private and public libraries and archiving for important stuff) in a reasonably easy to use form.

diigo's not perfect by any means - automated tagging suggestions could benefit from ML pixie dust - but certainly the best first stage of research and web page archiving solution I've found (compared to DevonThink, Pocket, Evernote, InstaPaper, A's Notes (and a few others I've forgotten))

DHPersonal3 years ago

For articles to read later I use the Safari Reading List. To store bookmarks I use GoodLinks (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodlinks/id1474335294) that syncs via iCloud and has iOS and macOS apps to store and display the collection. To catch any articles I may forget to store I use the Safari extension History Book (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/history-book-browse-search/id1...) that saves a searchable article list to return to later.

tacheiordache3 years ago

Im using onetab. I setup a shortcut (ctrl+shift+z) and close all my tabs which I may want back at some point with that shortcut. This healed me from wanting to hold onto my tabs. I kill them off with onetab and rarely do I revisit. Just knowing it's there helps a ton.

ilaksh3 years ago

Thanks for the recommendation. This is going to change my life.

https://www.one-tab.com/

somehnacct37573 years ago

I get the feeling most ppl keep tons and tons of tabs open these days. Browsers keep having to reduce the workload of background tabs, and have even added some UX features like tab grouping and pinning. And then there's the success of tab manager browser extensions...

delvallejonatan3 years ago

https://guardo.io/ does exactly this, it saves the entire page in case it gets deleted. It comes with a nice search engine where you can search for any words included in the page you save.

mcint3 years ago

I use Wallabag on a yunohost server. I highly recommend it. Easy saving, offline reading, and sharing between devices. I wish it were easier to share with others, but I read some PR comments yesterday clarifying why support has bigger implications for the tool.

bachmeier3 years ago

Hard to beat Zotero as a bookmarking service IMO. Saves a copy of the article and makes it available through the web interface if you're not at your usual desktop. $20 a year for 2 GB of storage is a good value if you want to go beyond the free plan.

tpoacher3 years ago

I do use bookmarks, but usually it's about crudely saving a session for easy access, to continue from where I left off the next day more than anything.

If I want to save a page for future reference because it's useful more generally, I actually have a special "References" deck in Anki for that, which has various useful levels of categorization applied.

Similarly, if it's an article I want to queue for serious future reading, I have a "Reading" deck. After reading (and potentially after having been converted to anki notes in the Main deck) notes from the reading deck go either in the Archived deck after reading, or in the References deck accordingly.

hegzploit3 years ago

I'm using raindrops across all my devices for curating links and tagging them.

It's a nice tool.

hegzploit3 years ago

Raindrop*

Oliver-Fish3 years ago

I mostly use bookmarks for easy access to commonly used tools and documentation; however, typically, I suffer from the fact when I need to share a set of bookmarks, the browser support of export/import is really awful for both the exporter and importer.

I encountered it so much that I built a tool in the last few months to allow sharing of bookmarks natively in the browser. I didn't want to use a new tool to manage my bookmarks; I just wanted to enhance the browser bookmark feature with the ability to share bookmarks.

https://www.bookmarkllama.com

octref3 years ago

I built my own. It's a Chrome extension that

- captures a tree tab structure (inspired by Tree Style Tab)

- has a text-heavy interface

- is keyboard driven (inspired by Vim)

- keeps data local or syncs to a GitHub gist (no server)

- exports to Markdown

I often hear from others they need something similar, and I thought about finishing it up so others can use it. But my fear is that I made too many personal design choices that nobody else would like, and changing those choices would make myself less happy (but surely make it easier for others to use).

If you are intrigued, here are some screenshots:

- https://imgur.com/a/D5CtJ6A

purplepatrick3 years ago

I used Pocket for a few years but the company never fixed any bugs that severely restricted its utility. Since then I’ve switched to Raindrop.io and have never looked back. I use it on web and mobile, and it’s excellent.

ibobev3 years ago

For some types of bookmarks I started to use a GitHub repositories with a markdown document in them. Those are my bookmarks collected mainly through HN:

- A list of freely available articles, tutorials, book about programming, math and science: https://github.com/bobeff/programming-math-science

- A list of open source games: https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games

memorable3 years ago

I don't use a bookmarking service, but I use built-in bookmarking, then every 2 days I export it to a specific directory on my machine in case of having to move to another browser or for rewinding time.

comboy3 years ago

I use Zim.

Not much different from just having a text file. Easy to backup, can grep keywords etc. Lack of sync is a disadvantage so I sometimes use "note to self" on signal when I want to save something from mobile.

cabbagesauce3 years ago

With FF it's Tab Stash for me[0]. Then I export to Chrome when I have a period of using it as my main browser.

For portability, I use a public Telegram channel that I post interesting links to for later reading. Given the web version doesn't require to be logged in and has a search bar it's very good for accessing everything you have.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

user00012-ab3 years ago

I use http://dynalist.io you can clip anything into your inbox, either the url (default when nothing is selected), or selected text on the page (with url of where it came from), and it works on all platforms. Once you have your data in a list you can do whatever you want with it and curate it the way you want, search it, and tag it.

Also, you can export the data out pretty easily also, which may not be the case with other bookmarking services.

pneto3 years ago

I made this shell script to save them in a text file with title and tags and I can search with fzf. The nice thing is that I can open urls in specific software. A video in mpv, a gemini url in amfora and so on. It's not really well written but it serves my needs. But I still need a way to import my browser bookmarks. https://github.com/paulobtn/cli-bookmarker

dvsjr3 years ago

I use the free pocket service with a browser extension to “save to pocket” which bookmarks with optional tags I can provide when I save. Also gives reader view on their site when I browse my saved list. Favorites archive feature article view highlights video aggregator. Can create collections too. It lets me save quickly which fits my workflow. Could I do the same with bookmarks? Not quite, I’m Mac at home pc and Mac at work so the saas feature fixes cross browser saving issue.

shkliarau3 years ago

I’m only saving articles for later (and then videos directly on YouTube). The problem with bookmarks is going back to them (if ever), so I always tend to forget about what I’ve saved and then just google what I need in the moment. With articles it’s a bit different but I used to save a lot of articles to Pocket and then Instapaper, and reading them not too often. Now using Alfread that sends me quotes from saved articles as reminders, so that helps a bit.

jdelacueva3 years ago

I use org-capture. The setup is a bookmark in firefox that triggers emacs, where I save all the pages I visit and that interest me. The links are saved in a plain text file, which I later edit and export to any format I wish. A good explanation here [1]

[1] https://mediaonfire.com/blog/2017_07_21_org_protocol_firefox...

drittich3 years ago

I'm still using a clone of https://del.icio.us/ that I wrote in 2004 after a fit of pique when it went down for a day or two. I use it almost daily and have amassed 11,490 links as of today, and most of them have the HTML cached.

It's kind of fun to track my interests over time by counting tag frequency, but I mainly use it out of nostalgia and for the mere constancy of it.

aquajet3 years ago

How do you get it to work with sites that are javascript-heavy or have heavy bot restrictions? I've been trying to make something similar but spent weeks just fighting edge cases on HTML not caching correctly.

drittich3 years ago

I don't worry about it and just use a straight-up HTTP GET. That works a surprising number of times. If I was trying harder I would use Puppeteer or similar and try to grab a full height screenshot. Most of the time I'm just clicking the URL to get back to the page.

Overtonwindow3 years ago

My bookmarks have not changed in a long time. I use the same bookmarks. I never really use the service, because I never really use bookmarks all that much, I’ll just Google something. I found the bookmarks get on wielding and I start losing track of them and I start having lists of bookmarks that are 9 years old.

Rather than bookmarks I use Pocket. It’s been very helpful especially for articles and technical websites that I want to be able to reference later.

dificilis3 years ago

I tried Pocket, but it wouldn't let me edit titles, which was a bit of a deal-killer. So then I tried Raindrop (free plan), and I have been using that ever since.

I use "collections" to describe abstract properties of a bookmark, like "work" for work-related, "reference" for 'I have read it but I might want to refer to it later'. Then I use tags for identifying topic - but a lot of the time there's enough info in the title, and tags don't really add much for the effort involved.

themadturk3 years ago

I'm also a heavy Pocket user, though a few things I clip into OneNote.

chiefalchemist3 years ago

Not sure if you noticed this bubble up on HN earlier in the week but this might be helpful.

It's not bookmarking as much as site-marking, and then having your own search engine based on that collection.

Figured it was worth mentioning.

https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/gettin...

mtone3 years ago

I add stuff in FF Group Speed Dial [0] under a variety of headings. I try to stick to ~100-150 links in there, deleting entire headings once past their usefulness.

They're no good as a long term knowledge base however -- search is too limited.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/groupspeeddia...

asdff3 years ago

I started just saving web pages I like. Bookmarks are great but they are so prone to link rot I find, so its better to save a local copy you can keep forever.

jxramos3 years ago

what technique do you use, a pdf printed copy or the File-->Save as-->Webpage Complete html thing?

mark_h3 years ago

I recently started actively bookmarking pages again recently (after being an early Pinboard customer, but not a particularly busy one). I wrote a script to email me 5 random bookmarks every day, so now I treat bookmarking as a "like" button; something I find interesting at the time, and may want to rediscover in the future. I rarely use bookmarks to find something I'm searching for though.

baldguyken3 years ago

I use pinboard.in

If I think I may need to refer to that content again, I'll also 'printfriendly' (convert the relevant content I need to PDF). I do this for 3 reasons, 1) In case I may need to refer to it again, and the website/content is gone. 2) I'm a digital hoarder. 3) I also like to have stuff available locally in case of extended internet outage

agmand3 years ago

I used some of the solutions listed here (like Pocket) for a time. Eventually, I decided I can just post them in my website [1], because why not : that way they are accessible from everywhere, easy to edit, categorize and comment, shareable with anyone in seconds.

[1] https://andirko.eu/wiki/bookmarks

(Edit: typo)

vasili1113 years ago

I use Chrome extension "Save as Shortcut" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-as-shortcut/f...) to save the link as a file on the file system. Works for me pretty well.

obiwahn3 years ago

I had a Mozilla wave back in the days. And I was very happy. Today you need 3 containers, is it awfully complex and there is no documentation. And the Mozilla guys are far less helpful than in the irc days. Could be cool. But unfortunately sucks. Is there anyone with a Mozilla sync setup, that is reasonably secure and willing to share his configuration?

unethical_ban3 years ago

Most of the things I find interesting are on HN or reddit, though I probably make about 20 bookmarks a year in my browser. I have Vivaldi sync set up.

I have an interest in building a "saved item" extraction tool for my reddit accounts that exports them to a bookmark file for offline storage. Same with Hacker News. Though if the tool already exists, please link it here!

czam3 years ago

I'm running a bookmarking site with a specific set of features at kntm.org and am using it since 2014, please join!

I also use OneTab (or similar) to clear up open tabs. I use Pocket just for sending articles to my kobo reader and Instapaper for read-it-later. Also using Materialistic app to quickly save HN articles.

I think the basic functionality of bookmarking will never be obsolete.

mikece3 years ago

I haven't thought about it in years... but is Delicious still a thing? I would think (hope?) there would be an open source, PHP-based project I could throw onto commodity hosting to collect and manage bookmarks. If this doesn't exist it should -- and I wonder how hard it would be to also integrate saving/sharing tab-sets as well.

lexa19793 years ago

What you're looking for is Shaarli => https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli

There's a whole community of "shaarlist" in France, you can also fuse several shaarli in a "river"... Some rivers are my 2nd HckrNws when I want to read something.

night-rider3 years ago

You can self host with Wallabag

night-rider3 years ago

Pinboard bought del.icio.us

RheingoldRiver3 years ago

I have literally thousands of bookmarks in Firefox that I use for their keyword aliases and manage by regex. But I don't think that's what you meant.

I also have several hundred "normal" bookmarks across several folders. Documentation, Hobby, "randomly cool," etc. But I definitely lose a lot of content that I wish I didn't.

pizzicato3 years ago

I use Pocket quite a bit.

I've also recently cobbled together a CLI tool that lets me save discussion threads on Reddit, HN and Stack Exchange. Very much a beginner-level project but here it is in case anyone is interested:

https://github.com/PizzaMyHeart/filum

tlavoie3 years ago

I use Pinboard, like many others here. The other thing I do is use that API to write new entries from time to time, to my own local DB, in case the author gets hit by a bus (as he's joked about). I haven't written a front end to do much _with_ my local copy, but figure that's a problem I can deal with when I need to.

abraxas3 years ago

I miss furl a lot. It was a short lived service in the days of Web 2.0 where it not only bookmarked the pages for you but also saved a scraped copy and indexed it so it was really easy to find content later. It was an amazing academic research tool that I think would be incredibly valuable for the problem it was trying to solve.

mmcdermott3 years ago

A few years ago, I started using a wiki as a sort of all encompassing knowledgebase. In time, my wiki took over even using browser bookmarks. When I found a link that I wanted to remember, I would include a link to it in the context of the entry. The upshot is that I always had context for what I wanted or thought about the link.

crossroadsguy3 years ago

No. I use Safari and no one makes any extensions for this browser anymore and I don’t blame them — Apple has put in significant amount of effort in discouraging such service providers. Installing third party apps is tedious and often breaks.

Last bookmarking service I used was pinboard. I still have an account on there but that’s about it.

pointlessone3 years ago

I use DEVONthink to keep a local copy (WebArchive) of interesting pages. On top of obvious bookmarking features like tags I get good search, annotations, and preservation to name a few things. Preservation is underrated. I have quite a few pages that are no longer available on the web (even in various archives).

walterbell3 years ago

DevonThink is one of those rare old-school apps which support open-standard protocols, e.g. self-hosted (FreeNAS/TrueNAS) WebDAV for sync of archives between iOS and macOS.

> Preservation is underrated. I have quite a few pages that are no longer available on the web (even in various archives).

Lire is an RSS reader that can archive the full text of all articles, even if the RSS feed is limited. Allows offline reading and mitigates the risk of blogs disappearing. http://lireapp.com/

miiiiiike3 years ago

I use Google Keep. It's amazing. It's one of those side tabs on GMail that you close when you first start a new account and never look at again.

I use the web and iOS version (through "share") half a dozen times a day.

https://keep.google.com/

danesparza3 years ago

You just wait. You're going to get hooked. Then Google is going to take it away. I used Google Reader daily until Google taketh away.

I'm not bitter, or anything.

doubled1123 years ago

Miniflux is pretty good though.

nafizh3 years ago

I used to use Keep. But have switched to pinboard for the last 8 months and incredibly happy about it. Just don't want to wake up one morning and see Google is shutting it down and go through all the hassle that comes with it.

miiiiiike3 years ago

"I don't want to use it because Google is going to shut it down" is HN's version of Twitter/Reddit's "Sir, this is a Wendy's". Here's some more pablum: "We can do better."

bribri3 years ago

I use the open source omnivore app which syncs all my articles and highlights to logseq https://briansunter.com/graph/#/page/omnivore-logseq-guide

Maxburn3 years ago

https://everhelper.me/client/

Gives a simple explorer style folder/bookmark structure. Can be reordered any way you want. Can sync to browsers if you want but I prefer to just use the website.

navalsaini3 years ago

I developed this over a weekend

rewq.app (after opening it once, you could swipe the name on the keyboard. The TAB key next to `q` triggers the auto-complete and completes rewq.app)

I use it making shortcuts to links or lists. Like, music -> ...music..link.. , so on.

When I swipe, rewq<TAB> ? music

The url opens. :-p

FYI ... Also comes with a chrome extension.

stasm3 years ago

If it's something I want to read and then be done with it, I keep the tab open.

If it's something I may want to come back to, or something that I'd be sad if it disappeared from the web, I save it to a synced folder using the SingleFile extension which inlines all content into a single HTML file.

causi3 years ago

Frankly I just want a progressive bookmark system. I want to be able to hit Ctrl+D on John Doe's blog site and have the bookmark keep track of where I was on the site. If I read the first three posts and then close the tab I want to pick up where I left off when I open the bookmark.

warrenm3 years ago

I have a set of IFTTT rules that collects stuff I post different places into my Merikebi (Amharic for "ship", "vessel", or "ark") blog

Everything, for example, that I post to Twitter gets scooped up and dropped there

Along with messages sent to a private email address, among other things

scarface743 years ago

Why? My Safari bookmarks are automatically synced between all of my devices. When I was using Windows, I could use the official Apple plug in for Firefox and Chrome to sync between Safari/Chrome/Firefox and they would each stay synced (eventually) between all of my browsers.

dontbesquare3 years ago

I use Nextcloud's bookmark features via the YunoHost instance I self host. A simple roll your own solution of sorts. https://yunohost.org/ is a really cool project. I love what they're doing.

jamisonbryant3 years ago

For temporary or read-later items, I have a Todoist project called "Links to Read" and I use the Todoist browser extension to send the page to that project.

For more permanent links, I maintain quite an extensive collection of bookmarks, all neatly organized by subject area and utility.

devracca3 years ago

I have a similar setup (I use raindrop.io) for temp links. I am meaning to find better organization ways for my permanent links. Curious to know details about your setup

_ank_it3 years ago

What do you use for permanent links? Manual maintenance?

abruzzi3 years ago

I haven't bookmarked anything in over 20 years. I just use my memory + search. Obviously bookmarking can retain far more than my memory, but my use of the web is deep, not wide (i.e. small number of sites, used heavily) so is easily handled by local site search engines.

dobin3 years ago

The bookmarks i require are usually research related, therefore clustered. Just add the link into Trilium (or other note taking software), and add a few bullet points of description.

If i need it again, i either know where it is (part of which research), or can find it with the note search.

xeromal3 years ago

I use my browser's bookmarks bar.

andyjohnson03 years ago

Sites and pages that i use get bookmarked in Firefox and synced to my devices.

Notable things that ai might need in the future go into Notion with (critically) some notes on context and why theyre important. If i xant be bothered to write any notes then its not important enough to be added.

devinegan3 years ago

I use a self-hosted docker image of Wallabag. Has worked well for years and replaced Pinboard for me.

juchilov3 years ago

Scrapyard, a WebExtension ScrapBook revival: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapyard/

kordlessagain3 years ago

I’m still working on https://Mitta.is, which saves sites, PDFs and images. It has some auto tagging enabled right now, with some additional GPT3 features coming soon for discussions about content saved.

freediver3 years ago

I use TinyGem (disclaimer: creator) as a reading list/bookmarking tool

https://tinygem.org

My public feed https://tinygem.org/tomcat/

marban3 years ago

Does Reddit support lookups by url? Since you're linking to comment threads.

freediver3 years ago

Not really, there is some code involved to do that.

marcomezzavilla3 years ago
dabedee3 years ago

I use Firefox bookmarks which syncs across all devices and has tags (although it's difficult to get them out without using the places.sqlite database file). I also have a subscription to pinboard.in but only to sync my FF bookmarks and tags there as a backup.

dzuc3 years ago
kristiandupont3 years ago

I typically write the URL in my notes if I need to look at it again for some specific reason.

For more silly things, I created a private subreddit together with my brother. We post things that we find interesting enough to share and re-visit in there, which is quite a nice format.

eternityforest3 years ago

I use Pocket because the Kobo Libra 2 reader supports it.

What I would really like, though, is if i could manage my bookmarks with SyncThing and have good browser integration.

I've always wanted some kind of SyncThing Companion App that provides NextCloud-y features with ST as the backend.

goddamnyouryan3 years ago

I created yet another place for me to store all my own bookmarks: https://link.horse

I mostly wanted to be able to categorize bookmarks within multiple tags, and easily be able to save them, using a bookmarklet.

gnuj33 years ago

Is this going to exist one year from now?

goddamnyouryan3 years ago

Why wouldn’t it?

hprotagonist3 years ago

I have a paid pinboard subscription.

_-david-_3 years ago

I store them in markdown files. It allows me to have a description and have multiple links for that description. I have separate markdown files for different categories.

For some pages I will manually use an archive service and include the archived links with the original link.

wzdd3 years ago

Yes, I wrote my own service after Maciej (very politely, this is not a criticism!) asked grandfathered-in single-payment Pinboard users if they would consider a recurring payment. It's a simple Python / Flask app which runs on a host running Dokku.

kirubakaran3 years ago

I'm building https://histre.com/

Bookmarks are just a starting point for easy knowledge management, online research, and collaboration. There's so much more that you could do with it.

igammarays3 years ago

I use the same app for archiving everything - bookmarks, whole website crawls, 15+ years of email history, receipts, large files and media, directories on my computer - everything. DevonThink - native mac app with fast search that has never failed me.

NelsonMinar3 years ago

I still maintain a linkblog, via Pinboard. You can read it via RSS from Pinboard or the best view these days is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/somebitsLinks

smusamashah3 years ago

I use Dynalist and a custom chrome extension which uses its API to save links to a list. On Android I use an app which can send http requests to any address. I use that to share urls from browser etc to that app which again send that link to Dynalist.

sbarg3 years ago

I've been using Pocket since it was ReadItLater. Two areas need improvement: 1) display of recipes in article mode and 2) display and redirection of Reddit articles. I'm intrigued with the yacy setup of user l72. I may check that out...

wild-eep3 years ago

I use the browser, mainly just to get autocomplete in the address bar.

But, browser bookmark management ranges from barely acceptable to irritating. Never great, or innovative, like some of these services. I wish the browser vendors would adopt some of this stuff.

5evOX5hTZ9mYa9E3 years ago

I just create a note in my personal wiki/notes and leave it there with enough metadata that I can later find it. If it makes sense, I also take a snapshot via archive.is or ghostarchive.org if it makes sense (the website is not a web-app).

hanoz3 years ago

Upvoting posts on Hacker News is my substitute for bookmarking things these days, as it's almost the only route by which I find stuff I wish to find again these days.

I'm just (still) waiting on someone to develop the app which lets me search it.

blm3 years ago

When people talk of searching Hacker News they seem to use algolia: https://hn.algolia.com/. Does this help you?

artdigital3 years ago

I'm using https://anybox.cc to hold my work life together. It's a native Mac/iOS app (not web based like raindrop) and very keyboard shortcuts heavy

varun_rayen3 years ago

Does it have any sync feature?

artdigital3 years ago

Yes! It syncs to iCloud across all apple devices

skyzyx3 years ago

Since 2006, I’ve gone from:

Delicious → Ma.gnol.ia → Delicious → Pinboard/Instapaper → Raindrop.io

aquajet3 years ago

Why so much switching?

dr41d453 years ago

All my bookmarks goes to a mess. So I found the best for me, at first save everything with Singlefile (extensions for browsers), then add everything to zip file. To search I use grep, find, etc. And this is perfect!

michaelcampbell3 years ago

I do, and love it. Raindrop.io is my provider, and one service I happily pay for.

viburnum3 years ago

I’ve been really happy with “Save as PDF” into my Dropbox folder. If you use Safari’s reader mode before you save it’s especially nice and the files are small. Works great with spotlight search and accessible on mobile.

djlewald3 years ago

Funnily enough, I made a CLI tool recently that bookmarks SSH connection strings. https://github.com/IamFlowZ/ssh-bm

arrosenberg3 years ago

I use Raindrop.io. Hits the sweet spot in terms of price and usability/UX.

gxqoz3 years ago

I don't suppose Raindrop has a read-aloud feature? This is one of my most heavily used features in Pocket. Looking at Raindrop's features I might be inclined to move if it does support this.

low_tech_punk3 years ago

I use a browser extension to store bookmarks in GitHub https://github.com/osmoscraft/osmosmemo

Pros:

1) Hostless, GitHub is the backend

2) works in multiple browsers

3) Has tagging

Cons:

1) No mobile client

2) Search is primitive

DaniDaniel50053 years ago

I’m working on one which auto saves your link as a screenshot and PDF:

https://github.com/Daniel31x13/link-warden

sqwrell3 years ago

I have been using this https://tagpacker.com I was able to import from my old delicio.us account years ago TagPacker extension is nice

focusedone3 years ago

Pockey + Pocket 2 Kindle for things I want to read later. Otherwise, HN favorites and digging through Firefox history / other devices to find that one page whatwasitcalled IknowIreadthatyesterday.

longnguyen3 years ago

Did you run into any trouble or limitations with this setup?

pajtai3 years ago

I found Toby very helpful for organizing the bookmarks I'm actively working from: https://www.gettoby.com/

igaray3 years ago

After I reached around 7-8k bookmarks the only thing that worked for me is an orgmode text file in a git repo, but it's true that I don't need fancy syncing or sharing/social features.

bazmattaz3 years ago

I’ve tried every app under the sun over the last few years but found myself not using them after awhile.

In the end I just email myself links and it works a treat. My emails are bookmarks are in the same place

epberry3 years ago

I've been enjoying https://daily.dev. The way they integrate into the browser is quite nice too. Well built all around.

mjmsmith3 years ago

I use Keep It [1] on macOS/iOS and save pages as PDFs.

[1] http://reinventedsoftware.com/keepit/

EntICOnc3 years ago
undoware3 years ago

Raindrop. Every day, for all things. The snapshots of the pages it takes means that if I see something I can later say something, it doesn't matter who grooms the content meanwhile.

micromacrofoot3 years ago

I pay for Pinboard but don't actually use it, I just like Maciej

bradneuberg3 years ago

I think most people's "bookmarking service" these days, including myself, is to just have an extra browser window that has a million "read later" tabs.

dizhn3 years ago

I use the Simple Tab Groups extension. Some of my tab group names: "Good Articles", "Work but Later"

(As a bonus they get backed up automatically including my pinned tab which Firefox loves to lose.)

hackermanve3 years ago

been there, i have a folder "TOREAD"

tin7in3 years ago

I'm storing links in Apple Notes or in the notes software I am building myself (https://saga.so)

derekzhouzhen3 years ago

For private stuff I only bookmark locally. For non-private stuff I use https://roastidio.us

caviv3 years ago

Oh yes I do. Best one ever is the https://yabs.io which is kind of like good-old-declicio.us

ubersnack3 years ago

I’ve started using History Book on iOS/macOS, runs as an extension in safari and can automatically save a copy of every page for easy searching later

lamontcg3 years ago

I only use bookmarks on firefox so I just sync them with firefox.

I generally don't open bookmarked pages in chrome, and if I ever did, I'd just use copy+paste.

Bolderman3 years ago

For articles I want to read later I use Pocket. It syncs nicely to my Kobo which I like much better for reading long articles than a computer screen.

leray_J3 years ago

Not really bookmarking, but close to, i use https://www.eesel.app/

eterps3 years ago

Yes, but in combination with highlights and annotation (I use diigo.com). memex.garden is a similar offering, although I haven't used it myself.

hevisko3 years ago
bravetraveler3 years ago

Can't say I ever have to be honest.

The furthest I go is using the facilities built into whatever browser I happen to be using.

I don't find myself really in need

SN764773 years ago

I use the notion web clipper, then tag in Notion.

didip3 years ago

I don't use bookmarking services.

In between:

1. Sending email to myself with appropriate keywords.

2. Writing them in Notes app.

3. and private git repo for my personal knowledge bank.

I got all my needs covered.

jascii3 years ago

I just copy the url to a plain text file, wget and grep if I need to find something and can't remember what's what.

corytheboyd3 years ago

I bookmark things in the browser and have Alfred index it for search (a built-in free Alfred feature). Simple and effective.

daniel_iversen3 years ago

Yes I looove Instapaper still after many years

Fire-Dragon-DoL3 years ago

I bookmark since like... 15 years ago, nowdays I use raindrop.io to tag bookmarks. Can't live without it!

racl1013 years ago

Still use Pinboard cause it's simple.

tr1ll10nb1ll3 years ago

I’ve been using Raindrop. It seems cool.

looknround3 years ago

I still fill up my bookmarks bar with folders and use Skrollo.com to store all my memes/fun stuffs.

jaw03 years ago

I used to use delicious, but after it got bought the Nth time, I went and built my own delicious clone.

karaterobot3 years ago

> If not, do you collect web pages some other way?

I send it to myself in the @karaterobot (or equivalent) channel in Mattermost, which is the self-hosted chat program I use. This is exactly equivalent to sending it to yourself in Slack, except that free versions of Slack have a limited history, after which your archive will be lost (or, rather, held behind a paywall). The advantage of this method is that it's organized by time, and searchable, and you can save links, documents, images, notes, etc.

rglover3 years ago

Yup. Pinboard. Maciej's commitment to rigid simplicity and speed has made me a customer for life.

tenzo3 years ago
honkycat3 years ago

I use the notion web clipper. Works great, I can have multiple databases for different interests.

chaostheory3 years ago

Yup, still using pinboard. It’s cheap and easy to use with no maintenance which imo is expensive

jbrun3 years ago

I use Instapaper for articles, videos and more. Does not work for dynamic web apps obviously.

njharman3 years ago

What's a bookmarking service?

syspec3 years ago

Raindrop.io It feels like a modern version of all the previous iterations of bookmarking.

wrycoder3 years ago

Firefox bookmarks (three layers deep) plus Instapaper for random non-technical articles.

maxk423 years ago
nojito3 years ago

Nope. I print every interesting website to pdf and use ripgrep to search through it.

dusted3 years ago

I've never had to, all the browsers I've ever used had bookmark support.

blaydator3 years ago

I will self promote as it’s one of the main use cases of Boomerang. It’s a minimal mail to self app for iOS and Android with share extension to bookmark website in one click. Emails are super convenient because you consult them everyday so your links doesn’t get lost in an app.

https://boomerang-app.io

meribold3 years ago

This is cool. I started using your app after reading about it here a few days ago. I guess you want to keep it as simple as possible, but have you considered adding the option to edit the email before it gets sent?

TavsiE9s3 years ago

I'm still using pinboard to access bookmarks on multiple devices.

jqpabc1233 years ago

Brave browser has this built in --- easy access from multiple devices.

mikece3 years ago

Does it allow you to share bookmarks or collections of bookmarks?

jqpabc1233 years ago

Yes, I share one set of bookmarks between a desktop, a laptop, a phone and a tablet.

danielovichdk3 years ago

I bookmarked this comments page because it has a lot of great tools

sagaro3 years ago

when I am researching on something, I usually just dump links with a line describing them on obsidian.md so I can go back to it when I need to. Bookmarks never worked for me.

abnry3 years ago

For a couple years I've been working on a personal Flask App that will collect and organize my SingleFile [1] downloads. Uses inotify to automatically detect a SingleFile generated html file and processes it into a database, where it also creates a screenshot thumbnail.

Been working great for me so far, and definitely help me improve my coding skills. One of the things I like the most is that it records the time I downloaded the SingleFile page, which means I can view a timeline of bookmarks. It is nice to visually review over the month what I decided to save, often as a way to reinforce what I learned.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodij...

ki_3 years ago

ofc, speeddial 2, except.. they updated it a few months ago. and it's broken now. fml. no updates for years, worked perfectly. until now.. so i dont recommend it.

BooneJS3 years ago

Not exactly what you’re asking, but I use Readwise + Pocket.

wazoox3 years ago

I collect/sort of bookmark useful pages with Zotero.

terpimost3 years ago

Just sending it all to my Telegram… there are tags there

matiastucci3 years ago

I use guardo.io and so far I'm pretty happy with it

sanwrencho3 years ago

I just use Pocket, it's not fancy but it works!

res0nat0r3 years ago

I just use buku now and sync the db file via Dropbox

philgo203 years ago

I have been using Refind for years. Happy with it.

quickthrower23 years ago

Iphone safari is my default bookmarking tool.

throwawayjun213 years ago

I have been using Firebox for a long time.

rg_ceo3 years ago

I use chatbot for collect useful links

AndrewDucker3 years ago

Pinboard too. Pretty happy with it.

kaffeeringe3 years ago

Yes. The app in Nextcloud is great.

flixing3 years ago

I use start.me and very with that

gnrfanperu3 years ago

Yes, I regularly use Raindrop.io

nokya3 years ago

I use Firefox sync. Make sure to open the settings page and to disable everything else, the default behavior is to capture credit cards, logins, passwords, and complete history (I would qualify this default behavior as 100% in violation with the privacy by default principle required by GDPR in EU but hey, who am I to voice an opinion :)

circa19773 years ago

Raindrop.io is great.

aiisjustanif3 years ago

Pinboard forever

browningstreet3 years ago

I use bookmarks.

spratzt3 years ago

I use Zotero.

anshumankmr3 years ago

I use Onetab

Cryptoclidus3 years ago

pinboard.in

marcomezzavilla3 years ago
Jistern3 years ago

Bookmarks never worked for me. If I find something interesting I add it to an existing Google Doc, or create an new Google Doc for it. Google Docs are easy to search.

yakorevivan3 years ago

raindrop.io .... best one Ive tried. Sooper fast and slick UI. Just works.... switched to this from getpocket.

sk8terboi3 years ago