How I centralize and distribute my bookmarks
robinglen.medium.com
robinglen.medium.com
In order to access my bookmarks i either need a local copy or have access to where my stuff is stored. To open any bookmark i search with `fzf` outside the browser. so i can work browser independently. (Can be integrated in rofi or dmenu.)
And in the near future I`ll upload resources in a webarchive format to ipfs node to preserve some of the current internet (and to not get involved with rate limiting when I update my buku metadata. Sorry HN, I'm not spamming, just updating meta data for my bookmark archive.)
https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb
[edited1 for formatting] [edited2 forgot to relate to the linked article]
Those bookmarks are more or less the tip of the iceberg. And they were almost all created during $DAYJOB which was years ago. Although already then (~2017) i had about 3500 sources in my RSS Server. And of course, I lost track of everything remotely interesting.
Archiving those links was fundamental work for creating my news blog, which is still run privately until I figure out how to implement a community communication system (mostly commenting) that will work on an IPFS backend. I mean, the comment section of HN is what has made me come to this site for years.
(On a mostly unrelated note, around ten years ago, someone posted a motivational/productivity article on Hacker News that used video-game-themed metaphors and artwork, reminiscent of Heroes of Might and Magic. It involved going down one path or the other, and for one of the paths, the author asked whether you really wanted to be "hanging out with the hydras". I've never been able to find it since. Does anyone remember it or know how I could find it?)
I meant I was loosing interesting articles on my RSS server without filtering. I won't be loosing resources that I have already archived.
On the other side, having so many sources allows me to find articles about one topic and group them. Making future research for reporters easier. At least I hope so.
[edit0 grammar and typo]
I've bookmarked your post for later ;), will have to go back and review in detail when time permits.
I like Pinboard for the ability to organize bookmarks in tabs, with tags, groups of tags, quickly stash a tab set, etc.
Bookmarks makes this info portable. It's like having close to O(1) access to the knowledge or tasks that are not immediately in your direct clickable range. Having extra non-title info makes this even better.
I blacklist "bad" sites that don`t care about freedom or sites that just make life harder for the reader. Like unnecessary advertisement, binding the core functionality to cookies and/or javascript, being not international, copying from other sites ... those criteria can sum up to a overall bad user experience. Those criteria are only "bad" for me in the context of news and blog sites.
Even as I type this, though, it feels more and more like a pipe dream.
How do you work with physical sources?
What makes you think it's a pipe dream?
The minimum useful version for me would be something that recognizes all media types AND allows commenting/notes in a standard format that links between them and is easily manageable.
In particular that would mean for me:
- read/highlight/notate/manage/organize functionality for epubs, PDFs.
- import physical books via ISBN and allow me to attach my notes there (ideally with a companion phone app that lets me scan/photograph relevant sections.
- photo library (ideally containing the aforementioned book pics while leaving them linked to the notes).
- multiple routes for surfacing old stuff.
But in all honesty: the reason I think it’s a pipe dream is because I’m fairly certain the limiting factor is being human, not the technology. Like I’m kind of hoping for a new paradigm for digesting media, but I also recognize that’s a pretty steep ask.
Relatedly I’ve been trying to build what I’m talking about out of emacs since COVID started, and I get some of the way there by org roam + org noter, but the difficulty of connecting emacs with various work cloud services and such has proved quite daunting.
But I’m still at it, because most tools of this nature are dev centric, whereas I’m prose centric, so much of my frustration comes from having tools that are CLOSE but fall apart in the last mile workflow (for my purposes).
Honorable mention to hookapp for mac, which I’m still wrapping my head around but may end up solving some of my nicher problem areas.
Would it be useful to create a 3D world where those PDFs take up space and stay where they're put? Let's say you open an app on your computer that shows you a virtual room, and there's a menu that lets you select a folder from your computer full of PDFs. You open the folder and a pile of physical documents appears as either a stack, a spread, or something messier.
Viewing from there would be really important. You'd need to bring the camera in really close to give you the ability to read anything. Or magnifying glasses. Maybe the ability to clone and transform pages and parts of pages while leaving them linked to their parent documents.
A mix of AR glasses and physical simulacra is where I expect it to go eventually. As in, I have 10 book “blanks”, and when I use AR glasses, they become whatever I wish (from my library). Ideally I could then flip around the blanks and see the content of the books — making it much more like my actual physical workflow.
Tl;dr you’re 100% right that the means and method of viewing are critical to what I’m after. But I think the main through line for me is that if I’m having to manipulate the camera AND the content, it leads back to the same issues I currently face. The point for me is being able to interact as I usually do, but with access to “physical” versions of everything I have digital (albeit with digital convenience — such as exif data readily available on the “back” of a photograph).
Hope that all makes sense and thanks for treating this so seriously!
My Pipe dream... I wonder what the actual quantity of unique text a human actually sees in their lifetime. Could this be easily stored? Like every word I ever read anytime?
I have this fantasy about a browser history on steroids that remembers not just the URLs, but the contents of everything I've ever visited. Not necessarily 100% retention of images and layouts, but at least searchable text. There are so many times when I'm simply unable to convince Google to find a page I read a few years ago. I've probably even bookmarked a project or two along those lines.
I suffer from the same affliction for the most part, but I do end up capturing sets of bookmarks related to research or projects that I share with colleagues. It also sometimes happens that I start a new browser profile for learning a tech and save all my bookmarks from that with the code. That has helped when it's a case of "how did I do this one thing I know I did in throwaway project X?"
The value of that larger set of bookmarks is like a personalized search history. When I search for a topic, I really like knowing whether I've already visited a relevant site. It saves sifting through raw search results for topics that come up a few times a year, or when I work on specific kinds of projects.
This is the only reliable way for me to find something I have a vague recollection of, which happens quite often. In the past I used to simply type whatever I could recall into Google search and often find it, but that just doesn't work any more. It's not just the SEO stuff, also the bias towards recent content seems to have increased, and obviously the pace of content generation as well. The haystack is much bigger now than it used to be.
But don't let its attempt at a friendly README fool you, it's personal-grade software of "works-on-my-machine", and barely, quality.
If you want to look at something more polished, I think https://github.com/amirgamil/apollo and https://github.com/thesephist/monocle are worth taking a look.
Also there's the https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI library, which you could build on, though it mainly relies on data dumps from the different services instead of crawling and fetching through APIs, which is why I didn't use it. Keeping up with API changes is bad enough, I don't want to deal with undocumented dump formats...
I gave up on collecting links, I'm not organized enough, it always turns into an unusable mess.
OTOH, I taught high school math briefly, and this reminds me of the evergreen question "When are we ever going to use this?" And the honest answer that most students in the classroom will never use more than a tiny portion of the anything they're taught beyond basic algebra (maybe not even that).
And yet it's worth doing sometimes because at any given point in life, you don't know exactly what you're going to be or do later. You want to do what is more likely to open doors than close doors later.
Even if you learn your HS math well, you probably won't get by on that skill specifically. You'll either train on deeper specifics that HS math gatekept... and/or you'll probably forget enough of it that you'd have to come back and brush up and then get into specific applications.
But you'll remember there was such a thing as this kind of problem solving and have some idea of what it entailed and where to find out more.
Kindof like a bookmark.
https://defaultcharacter.com/2021-09-bookmark-controller-int...
I also mirror saved items from other services (e.g. reddit/HN/twitter/instapaper) as plaintext org-mode files, via orger [1].
Then, all of this feeds into Promensia [0] [1], a tool I wrote that serves as a web browsing copilot and surfaces my bookmarks (or any relevant links, really) when I'm browsing.
That way I don't need to worry about spending too much time processing bookmarks and that I'd never read them, I can just read the most interesting stuff and the rest is searchable (so I use it as a knowledge base/personal search engine), and surfaces in my browser via Promnesia, so I can find out if I have some relevant information in my knowledge base without actively searching. I don't need to suffer from vendor lock-in (even if the service/tool is open, migration is always painful), I can just add another adapter to my system and feed it into Promnesia/Orger.
[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp#readme
[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
What happened to Delicious: https://www.failory.com/cemetery/delicious
"""
My name is Maciej Ceglowski. I bought what remains of this site in 2017 for about the price of a Volkswagen. I got that money from running a paid clone of del.icio.us called Pinboard.
"""
It really is an incredibly powerful tool that I use for all kinds of things (e.g. https://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1447155166453567497)
Every time I send someone a topical/relevant link for a discussion or project I'm involved with, people always ask "How do you find this stuff?". I mention that it's primarily reading great Hacker News posts or tweets and just saving it over time.
Maciej's blog is also particularly entertaining including both funny technical and non-technical posts.
Very reasonably-priced, might have to give it a try.
A tip, use the bookmarklets in your bookmark bar: https://pinboard.in/howto/
One solution kept the bookmarks in an internal DB and would create them on an endpoint (eg a non-persistent virtual desktop) at sign-in. Sometimes this failed due to whatever reason and you had no bookmarks for that session. Oh well.
But wait the solution also synced bookmarks when the browser process was closed. That sync didn't fail so now all your bookmarks were overwritten with a blank bookmarks file and were thus erased from the DB too! Now you got to call support and have them revert your bookmarks to the previous version. But thankfully the service eventually included a self-service portal where you could revert them yourself.
Heaven forbid you have two active endpoints. Last write wins? Maybe!
I don't think CAP theorem is particularly relevant in this scenario. Sounds more like they were doing an overly basic "just overwrite with the current state" instead of sending individual commands, e.g. "create this bookmark".
The reason is likely a procurement problem. Anything that's "enterprise" and calls things "endpoints" is off to a bad start in my book.
Much like other posts on here, todo apps and bookmarks don't really work for me either, they just get out of date. It's not really about personal bookmarks, it's more about trying to give people in a company a consistent experience and making onboarding a bit more self-service. I use this as a way to store my companies URLs, keep them centralised and stored in my browser. The Slackbot was then a way of making it accessible to non-technical users.
I had ideas about making a web app and other interfaces to update the YAML but I wanted to keep it simple, base it peoples existing toolchains and a GipOps approach for versioning. There are a bunch of other tools I want to build around onboarding and OOH support but I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested so all of this was really nice to read.
Thank you
https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021218111-How...
* tracks every web page you visit, saves full text * makes it searchable later
So when you think about, “what was the page I found on HN that was talking about xyz”, you can find it via a quick search. In theory, anyway.
I came across BrowserParrot doing something like this (I am not the author, just found it intriguing)
https://www.browserparrot.com/
HN discussion:
But I really enjoy reading the comments how everyone has either build something themselves, uses some (sometimes obscure/niche) tool, or has bundled a bunch of stuff together into something that works for them. OP's solution also looks nice.
The previous version was a free service without the need to sign up - just create a bookmark collection page with an optional password, then anyone with the password can use it right away. The link to the collection could be totally anonymous because the app tracked nothing at all. But I got 0 users, apart from myself. So I rewrote it from scratch to make the collections more organizable. The sharing is still anonymous because there's no way for another user to know who created them. There has to be a way, however to track your own bookmarks, so I guess it's not truly "anonymous" as in "impossible to track" (the database contains the bookmark owner). But it seemed this time around people are more interested. I guess there has to be a balance.
https://jaytaylor.com/notes (warning: all on one page, it's grown large over the years, please be gentle to my poor server)
It's open-source, just a python module you hook up an Evernote API key and tell it which "notebook" to use:
https://github.com/jaytaylor/evernote-publisher
Really handy to not lose track of links and pages (though my system could definitely be further improved). I also like that it's naturally cross browser since the clipper plugin is available for both FF and Chrome.
AFAIK, I'm the only one using it :)
Most browsers do seem to follow a standard, but I've yet to find a way to sync them across browsers, devices and machines (without having to use some 3rd party service like Evernote, or what have you). I always prefer solutions/approaches that don't require users to change their behaviour (eg. use another service to track links).
With the forthcoming version manifest v3 for Chrome extensions, this may prove trickier, but it should in theory be possible :)
I have always wanted to self-host an instance of this app as I use several different desktop/mobile browsers.
is a good alternative
So for example http://go/project-X, go/JIRA-123, go/team, go/team/oncall. References to the links were scattered across dozens of documentation pages and you just got used to that state over time. I always thought that a proper bookmarking system would do wonders for onboarding and documentation (by forcing people to maintain organisation if they wanted to use the links).
https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/bookmarks
Eventually, I'd like to add "level" markers that give more info about number of levels contained or number of bookmarks therein.
Glancing over the blog post, it almost feels overengineered. Conveniently, the Chrome Bookmarks file already is JSON and I created a small tool that takes it as input and renders it with Handlebars templates. It also includes a simple way to get thumbnails and an HTML template with expandable folders (no JavaScript needed).
Recently, I have been storing groups of tabs related to a subject in the Firefox Simple Tab Groups extension. The UI is a bit hokey, but it does let me context switch between complex tasks quickly.
These 3 systems allows me to adequately save links to almost anything based on context.
I wish the tools in this space were better to share bookmarks between systems but it seems like a lost cause with all the bookmark systems shutdown.
Now I also just archive / export my bookmarks into Archivy [1].
https://philosopher.life/#:[tag[Link%20Log]!tag[Log%20Audit]]I also use pages for other strings I want to share like podcasts or for specific projects.
You can also share this easily with other users
I have had the extension be pretty slow in the past, especially on weak devices. But I do like the syncing backend of OneNote (works pretty well), I just wish the whole 'notebooks' setup was a little looser - it's pretty restrictive.
More out of inspiration from digg and similar sites.
and browser extension https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori-web-ext
It has a slick iOS app that I use to bookmark TikToks and Instagram posts together