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Comment by zubspace | Hacker News Reader

I've never managed to keep my bookmarks all organized. Never. And I really tried, but always give up after a while for one reason or another.

And link rot is also real. I sometimes wonder, why browsers make it so damn hard to store web pages locally. Is it because of lost ad impressions?

There was an old (xul?) extension once called Scrapbook which was super awesome, but unfortunately it stopped working and all alternatives seem to be subpar.

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You could try...

https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox

Both allow you to save web pages locally. Polar is easier to use and it's an Electron based desktop app. ArchiveBox uses a CLI and requires Python I believe.

> And link rot is also real

True. I have a script that sends my bookmarks to Internet Archive's Save Page Now service: https://pastebin.com/uUVE22RD . Since I still have URLs in my bookmark manager (Pinboard[0]), finding the pages in IA is simple.

I'm also sometimes scraping documentations with HTTrack (webhttrack), when they aren't available as docsets (Zeal[1], Dash[2]), for times when I work offline or with spotty connection.

[0] https://pinboard.in/

[1] https://zealdocs.org/

[2] https://kapeli.com/dash

Zotero, the reference manager, is actually a good way to store website snapshots. It has one-click-to-save browser extensions, and it generally saves a snapshot of the web page along with any other saving method (e.g. downloading the PDF if you're on a page associated with a scientific article). It also saves the source URL as well. Now that I think about it, it might actually make a decent bookmark manager.

I have started to use Zotero for managing bookmarks. It works quite well - maybe even very well. Also, I can back up to .csv (among other formats) and always have my links. Only downside is to remember to have Zotero up and running - it's similar to needing a local server in that respect.

What about its successor https://github.com/danny0838/webscrapbook ?

Due to limitations in Firefox's add-on API you have to set up web server to actually browse your saved pages, which is a big step backwards in functionality. Although I haven't tried it recently; maybe it's gotten easier to set up.

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