Show HN: Reminiscence, self-hosted bookmark manager and personal wayback machine | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Reminiscence, self-hosted bookmark manager and personal wayback machine

github.com

213 pointskanishkalinux47 comments

I've needed self-hosted bookmarks for a while. There are some written in Java and PHP, but they just don't seem very approachable.

This is a great project. Here are some things I noticed that set this project apart from others:

1) Detailed (up-to-date!!) documentation for installation. Sometimes you have difficulties installing a project because either the documentation is out of date or just excludes important details. Not true here - you create the virtualenv and run the scripts. There is nothing esoteric about setting up this project to use.

2) It's on the latest version of Django. It can be a little discouraging to use a project that is running on a version of a library that is no longer supported.

3) It doesn't require redis or nginx to run out of the box. It works as expected without these things, which means I was able to test the project simply by installing the python dependencies.

4) The interface is simple to use.

5) Project can be scaled up with celery.

6) Full disclosures about problems one may run into with this project and how to address them.

It took me 1 minute to install this project. I didn't encounter any errors. THIS is how you get people to use your project.

The only thing I can say is that the interface needs a little improvement, but this is so easy to over look with such a functional project.

Thank you kanishka-linux for creating this project.

That was amazing feedback! Thanks a lot!

About user-interface, I agree it needs improvement. Especially inbuilt reader needs some work.

Can you suggest some improvements in UI?

Most of this is personal preference for me, so I would take what I'm saying with a grain of salt.

There are some spacing issues here and there - the username/settings drop down next to the search input is not vertically aligned with the rest of the elements. The create new directory form and add URL form is pushed to the right a bit. I'd either center those or keep them aligned left.

One thing I'd try is making the create new directory part into a pop over. It would actually increase the time to create a new directory (additional click/tab), but in my case it'd be okay since I would be creating new ones so infrequently. The idea is a "new directory" button with that form in a pop over when active.

I'd consider using list elements instead of a table for the directory listing and link listing.

For the directory listing, I'd experiment with replacing the links count/action dropdown with something right next to or immediately below the link to the directory. i.e.

    MyDirectory <link icon> 3 • rename • remove

With more emphasis (using styles) on the name of the directory. Hovering over <link icon> 3 could have a title attr that said something like "3 links in MyDirectory".

But the project works fine and the UI isn't really taking too much away from using it.

Pretty detailed suggestions! Thanks. I'll keep them in mind when iterating on next version of the project.

A chrome extension would be necessary for something like this to replace Pinboard/Instapaper for me (I see that in the TODO already). But looks good otherwise. The only thing stopping me is the time commitment of hosting another app for personal use.

Why do you want to replace Pinboard/Instapaper? What feature do you miss?

Smart auto-tagging.

Related links.

I don’t think they archive links. They only bookmark them. Am I wrong?

Pinboard has an archive option at a higher subscription level.

Where higher is still a ridiculously cheap $25/yr

And you don’t have to care about disaster recovery, backup and upgrades? If I were half-serious about my bookmarks, I’d pay that much. I am not though and pinboard free account is enough.

Not just that, but also link rot. In five years how many of those URLs will still have useful info on them?

(I didn't even know pinboard had free accounts.)

IIRC, I paid a small fee once, 10$ or something, but even when the website changed to subscription only, I was never asked to pay additional fee.

https://historio.us archives links. Disclosure, I wrote and run it.

Being self-hosted and open-source?

This is cool. I am going to try this out. See also webrecorder.io.

I want a record button in my browser bar that I can leave on!

Thanks. I didn't know about webrecorder. It also looks cool. I'll look into it.

You might also be interested in https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb, the author of webrecorder is a major contributor to this.

It looks quite innovative. I'll see if I can get some ideas from it.

Exciting! I'm still badly in need of a bookmark manager (and hopefully sync-capable) since xmarks shutdown. I'm looking at Shiori, ymarks, and Floccus. How does Reminiscence compare?

While we're here, I'd love your assessment of the xmarks alternatives

I really miss having synchronised bookmarks between chrome, chromium, and firefox. All my bookmarks live / fit in the bookmarks bar, and synced bookmarks were a deitysend for seamless movement between laptop/desktop/vdi/work/home/etc.

Reminiscence has some advance features like auto-tagging, auto-summarization and archiving in various formats, which separates it from other bookmark managers. Few days back, I posted it on r/selfhosted and there one fellow redditor suggested to contact Floccus dev, instead to writing bookmark addon for every browser. Hopefully, I'll get in touch with the Floccus dev and will see if it can support Reminiscence in some form or other.

Also have a look at https://historio.us, which I wrote.

I love this and love that it's built in Python, but…

"Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard"[0]

[0] https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...

I like Pinboard and think it’s a great service.

Personally, I don’t like services for software. I like this model where I pay for my own hosting (which I do already) and run OSS software for free. To me, the DIY model is suitable and sustainable for user level programmers.

very cool. may also be worth mentioning the difference between this and projects like shaarli, https://github.com/pirate/bookmark-archiver , etc.

Thanks fo linking bookmark-archiver here. I liked the sound of reminiscence but unfortunately it requires bleeding edge python and tries to integrate the webserver (and many other things that don't need to be). It's a matter of taste I suppose but I couldn't get it working. bookmark-archiver just works on all my systems, old and new.

How is 3.5+ bleeding edge? It's been out for more than 3 years, and is installed by default on most current OS releases.

I personally only support the latest stable release, so I only support 3.7.

Python is extremely backwards-compatible so there's never been any breakages for me, from 3.4 to 3.5 to 3.6 to 3.7.

It doesn't integrate web-server in default installation. In docker installation, one can change docker-files and remove components which they do not want.

Thanks! I have not used shaarli and bookmark-archiver personally. But from their documentation it looks like shaarli doesn't archive in various formats and doesn't have auto-tagging feature. About bookmark-archiver, I think one can't add links into it directly via web-interface and doesn't organize links directory-wise apart from features like auto-tagging and summarization. I'll look into alternative bookmark managers, and will try to provide some comparison chart in README.

Nice. Are there plans to add saving of annotations (highlighting text and string to the link) like Diigo? Annotations seem to remain a elusive feature in a self hosted solution.

Thanks! I'll add support for annotations in project's TODO list. It'll be a nice addition to any archiving solution.

Starred the project, look forward to it. This is the only feature that has me tied to using a hosted solution, instead of a self-hosted solution.

I love the idea, but is this a little bit overkill if you just want to mirror your bookmarks? There's several simple spidering tools out there that you could change the User-Agent on in order to get mobile or desktop pages, and then you don't need to maintain or run any servers or special tools. I would export my bookmarks, run a cron job on them with a spider tool, and commit the result to Git.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Not really the same, as setting up Reminiscence seems to be fairly involved as well.

HTTrack is something that has been around for years and can rewrite the pages it downloads to internal links to the archived webpage.

I think, wget is even better and much older than it.

Ah thanks. HTTrack would be easier for those not educated in the command line though.

By the way, this application is not just about archiving. For regular archiving wget (and in your case HTTrack), are more than sufficient. Reminiscence has been developed for bookmarking, archiving, organizing and access from anywhere.

I have a ghetto version of this - I just print web pages to PDF, and then archive the PDF locally to storage. I have every website of interest to me I've ever read since 1997 saved this way - and can harvest a lot of data from the 16,000+ PDF files I now have.

Beats me why this isn't just a normal feature in the browser. No need for no stinkin' SAAS to do it ..

I like the robustness of this type of solutions, so here's a bunch of questions:

Do you also use a folder hierarchy for separate topics, and-or a file naming scheme?

And have you scripted the pdf generation to an extent, or is everything done by hand? (I suppose manual saving and pdf naming might work as a fairly nice "bullshit filter", at least for some period.)

How much time does it usually take for you to store a link that way?

Folder hierarchy: nope. Just 15k+ files in a sub-directory. There is a reason for this: its just so convenient to grep for a subject I'm interested in, thus:

    $ ls -l |  grep "hacker news"

PDF Generation scripted? Also no. This is just a print-to-pdf hotkey away, no need to script it. The PDF names come from the title of the web page, so its sometimes necessary to adjust this and make my own title, but only about 2% of the time.

Time to store? As much time as it takes to print most web pages to PDF - i.e. mere seconds.

And there is so much data to be harvested in the collection - best of all, its all mine. No third-party gets to see it, collate the data, see where my interests are, sell me things, etc.

I would love the ability to bookmark an entire site. Does this allow full spidering?

Currently, it does not allow full spidering.

What do you do if the page has videos and gifs? Does this support those?

About videos, I'm thinking about providing some way to add custom user scripts, so that users can use their favorite download manager to download media elements from site.

About gif, they are will be included in the archived page. Everything with 'img' tag will be fetched for archiving.

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