I applaud your minimalistic workflow, however, ive always found bookmarks next to useless (i still use them). Of course thats my own problem, just pointing out what benefits I get using other tools.
Yes you can. Use sqlite on the underlying datasource and some minor scripting.
> ive always found bookmarks next to useless
You need to change your view on bookmarks: they are mostly a data source.
Nobody maintains a carefully crafted tree of bookmarks, if only because interests and personal ontologies change with time.
Instead of expecting yourself to click on your bookmarks, see them as providing extra data to create your own JIT approach, that will depend on algorithms and automation instead of requiring you to do many things by hand (including reading and summarizing)
If you want to write something, here's a simple candidate heuristic for such a score:
- level 0 is if you've visited the page at least once (if you haven't, you can't include it in your search)
- level 1 is if you've visited the page more than once, then and how frequently / recently
- level 2 is if you've bookmarked the page
- level 3 is if you still have a tab or a collection (in Edge) featuring this page
The Ctrl-F approach is the simplest way to test the efficiency of a JIT approach, and to let you compare it to the complex proactive approaches often suggested (which require effort, and will waste a lot of time for sure on the 99.99% cases where YAGNI)
Notice how without even touching sqlite, you can Ctrl-F in different places to hit level 0 (history), level 2 (bookmarks), level 3 (this one depends on your OS and how you can search active windows)
You'll get over 80% of the benefits for far less time spent on it.
If you really insist on making some DIY solution, using the time gained to improve the way you can use these datasources by putting them under one umbrella is likely to give you more gains than any approach requiring so many manual steps and tweaks.
It's like new years resolution: you'll give up after a while because of the effort/commitment required.
Except it's worse, because you'll have wasted time and money creating a complicated knowledge assimilation stack, while you could have use the same amount of effort to do something you're more likely to stick to, as it requires less effort.
The approach suggested here still requires highlighting and writing a note. I have no time for that: I read, and if something is interesting, I bookmark and hope I will remember the keywords.
And if I didn't even bookmark, as long as I more or less remember some keywords, I will be able to find that on DDG in a few minutes.
> You need to change your view on bookmarks: they are mostly a data source.
ill try to integrate this mental model.
But still this seems far less flexible for me then what is currently set up. I spend very little time maintaining my setup, actually to me its conducive to how i read articles in general. Highlighting for example, if i see something important ill reread the sentence until im sure i understand what of its point/implications. i nearly always have time to highlight something..
> I bookmark and hope I will remember the keywords.
i dont see this as a reliable system. My memory is not perfect.
> Except it's worse, because you'll have wasted time and money creating a complicated knowledge assimilation stack
its no different then your 4 level process just outlined, which even relies on sql, a deal breaker for ~95% of the population. you still have a mental model for your system, same as i do. You're correct on the money aspect. But to me the value far exceeds the cost. The setup is frankly very simple, save article for now or later, read, highlight anything interesting and add my thoughts, those automatically appear anywhere i need them device wise, and spaced reptition is automatically sent to me each morning. I wouldnt switch to manually writing SQL queries of bookmarks and relying on my memory if you paid me.
> It's like new years resolution: you'll give up after a while because of the effort/commitment required
On the contrary.. i rely on simple short habits and system building to be efficient long term. My setup fits both those criteria.
--
But again, this stuff ultimately is a preference, your tone almost seems to suggest everyone should only set bookmarks and search their contents using SQL queries, which is mind boggling to me. Your perspective is appreciated however.
It totally is. It's also far less costly in time.
> i nearly always have time to highlight something..
I don't. I guess we have different usecase
> My memory is not perfect
Exactly! And it's a feature!! See that as a mechanism to purge an entry from the cache if it hasn't been refreshed for a while.
The problem with bookmarks (and TODO, and everything) is that they tend to accumulate, since there's no natural pruning mechanism. So you need to only use them as a data source, or augment them with some algorithm to extract what remains relevant.
> you still have a mental model for your system, same as i do
My model runs in the background, and doesn't depend on any action.
If at any point in time I need something, I'll fire up a query that will hit all datasources to give me a list of possibilities sorted by this rough score, so something in edge collections (level 4) will be above something in level 3 etc.
Someone here gave stats: in 4 years, for 7000 entries, they used their system 20 times. That's like a 0.28% usefulness. It's not worth spending much time on.
> I wouldnt switch to manually writing SQL queries of bookmarks and relying on my memory if you paid me.
Well, if your system makes you happy, stick to it.
Personally, I prefer to optimize my workflow for 99.72% of the usecases than the 0.28%
> this stuff ultimately is a preference
Totally
> your tone almost seems to suggest everyone should only set bookmarks and search their contents using SQL queries
If you got that impression, sorry. I think your system would work for people who are say researchers and need to carefully read and categorize everything.
My personal belief is that isn't the case for the modal HN reader, and that they'll be best served by being lazy and avoiding premature optimization - and if they really want to optimize, maybe they can start tapping into the data that's already collected (bookmarks, timestamped visit) some of it automatically instead of creating a parallel workflow that's highly dependent on their ability to do some manual tasks (highlighting, reading, annotating) that will require a lot of effort considering it will be useless about 99.72% of the time
I also want to do as little work up front as possible, but I have spent so much time trying to find something I remember that I read that I try to optimise the process.
I do that (on the Mac) by automatically indexing all the websites that I visit via the app HistoryHound. That way I am pretty sure that I can find a website again by searching by words (that I think) I remember from the content.
I have also tried a lot of external bookmark managers and have now settled for an app called BookMacster. Reading a webpage I then just press a key combination and get up a small window where I type in tags (with autocompletions from earlier tags) and if I want, copy and paste an interesting part into the note section of the window. This way I get tagging that is non existent in Safari and can automatically push bookmarks back to all the browser that I am using. (Not affiliated in any way with these apps by the way).
Finally, sometimes I wonder when I read a page for the first time. I can't see that directly in Safari as the browser only shows the last visit in its history function. So then I access the Safari History via sqlite using something like this:
[$] sqlite3 /Users/myuser/Library/Safari/History.db
sqlite> select datetime(history_visits.visit_time + 978307200, 'unixepoch', 'localtime') as dantime, history_visits.title, history_items.url, history_items.domain_expansion, history_items.visit_count FROM history_visits INNER JOIN history_items ON history_visits.history_item=history_items.id WHERE history_visits.title LIKE "%My Hacker News knowledge assimilation stack%" ORDER by dantime;
I didn't remember where I picked up the idea for this script, but using HistoryHound searching for 'dantime' it looks like I got it at 2020/05/11 19:03 from: http://2016.padjo.org/tutorials/sqlite-your-browser-history/...
So there: Ate my own dog food :)