Show HN: Keep your bookmarks clean and up-to-date | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Keep your bookmarks clean and up-to-date

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83 pointsneiman144 comments

Hey HN, this is just a super simple browser extension that I put together in a few hours to fix the annoying issue of bookmarks becoming outdated (e.g. the bookmarked page being deleted or removed). Just run the extension every once in a while to update the favicons and move dead sites into a trash folder (where you can then decide whether you want to keep or delete them).

Thanks to hrez for the suggestion in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29796099

Repo: https://github.com/samueldobbie/remarkable-extension

Chrome Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remarkable/mjmbcbg...

Great work!

Thanks a lot!

Haven't tried it yet, but potential feature idea – an option to try to find these dead bookmarks in archive.org & update the links instead of moving them to trash.

Great idea - appreciate you sharing.

If you do this, which would be awesome actually and I second the request, I recommend shooting the bookmarks to http://web.archive.org/save/<url> to make sure the archive scrapes it at the time of bookmarking.

I like that! Could definitely see it being quite a valuable option, provided it was opt-in.

I sometimes rename bookmarks when the name is too verbose and not to the point. It may be good to have an option for not updating the names.

And in case of dead links maybe prepend the name with "[404]" or similar instead of moving?

Hadn't really considered bookmark renaming, thanks for the suggestion :)

Hi, that's a pleasant surprise. Thanks. Some QA and possible suggestions:

1. exclude chrome:// and about:// URL's

2. Not sure how, but it would be nice to one-click restore an item from Trash back to where it was. Alternatively, perhaps mark in-place instead of moving to Trash? Then it's easy to spot them and manually remove. Also I got quite a few false positive sites with valid certs etc. Increase timeout perhaps?

3. this might be impossible, but I wonder if there is a way in chrome to download /favicon.png without opening the whole page in a new tab.

Hey - glad you spotted the thread! RE: your suggestions:

1. Good idea, will be sure to include this in the next release.

2. Sorry to hear that, I've had a few messages about false positives now, and have pushed a temporary fix (https://github.com/samueldobbie/remarkable-extension/pull/4) which causes false negatives instead. I'm thinking the best approach is to mark them in-place as you suggest, with an option to move them to the trash after they've been marked.

3. I'm currently exploring this exact concept! Hopefully, it will update them in the background & enable you to choose a default favicon for pages without one. Definitely seems possible.

> this is just a super simple browser extension

But this extension works for me very well. This is a very nice idea!

Bookmarked to do later.

Would love to see a Firefox version of this.

Planning to add Firefox support soon!

Thank you! Any way to be notified when that happens?

The easiest way would be to join this newsletter https://creative-knitter-9009.ck.page/66aa398945 (excuse the domain, just put it together now).

Alternatively, you could subscribe to this issue https://github.com/samueldobbie/remarkable-extension/issues/...

I dont suppose you by any chance might have an Apple developer Account.....? :)

Not yet, although I recently made the switch from Linux to macOS, so Safari support is likely to be on the roadmap!

Please add a license to your code. https://choosealicense.com/ if you need help.

Good catch, added an MIT license.

The cost of a dead bookmark hanging around is virtually zero and nowhere near the overhead (and small but non-zero risk) of another extension.

Sometimes there is value in knowing that a site has gone under, versus you not being able to remember the URL.

One can fetch dead URLs via Wayback machine.

The chances of a site (or several) temporarily being unreachable out of all my bookmarks is very much non-zero and I could see this plugin trimming bookmarks unnecessarily.

Sometimes a page is moved but not deleted. If you have some metadata, then you can find the page again.

Any HN tips on heuristics for bookmark management?

More for read it later services like pocket, but I like https://medium.com/life-hacks/fighting-information-overload-...

Basically delete everything every week.

yet another speed dial (thats the name):

https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial

I have around 40.000 bookmarks that I try to keep organized (as resources for my blogs, future ideas, etc...). I have an hard time keeping track of what's not good anymore.

Is your extension a good fit for such a large collection of bookmarks ?

(Plus, I'm on firefox, so +1 for a firefox extension)

To be honest I haven't tested it on anywhere near that quantity of bookmarks, so I'm not entirely sure how well it'd perform.

My suggestion would be to either wait for the extension to mature a little bit before testing it, or to export your bookmarks first so you have a backup. The extension itself is non-destructive in that it won't delete your bookmarks, but there may well be undiscovered bugs that could mess up your current organization of bookmarks, etc.

I started sending myself email. I have a filter which moves them to a dedicated folder. I sometimes post the content of the webpage into the body of the email if I worry the site might go away. I will reply to my messages when I want to save additional notes and related information.

In case you didn’t know - if you email an article in ‘reader mode’ it will automatically copy the text to the body of the email as well as including the hyper link to the webpage

Do yourself a favor and use one of the below tools instead of browser based bookmarks

1. LinkAce: Save your bookmarks and organize them with tags and lists. The bookmarked page is gone? No worries. LinkAce automatically links it to archive.org page.

2. Shiori: Save bookmarks, archive them or use it like pocket. Like LinkAce you can organize your bookmarks using tags

[1]: https://www.linkace.org/ | https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/

[2]: https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori

My browser based bookmarks are a far denser and more accessible collection of links than any of those links can manage, in presentation mode.

I maintain bookmarks across 3 browsers and account profiles and groom them regularly and archive them myself and wish browsers took bookmarks/favorites more seriously.

Or Pinboard - https://pinboard.in/ - which can monitor your Twitter account, even locked accounts, and automatically bookmark and archive links there, and you can search the full text for archived links.

Using browser-based bookmarks would definitely be a step backwards for me. My phone, my tablet, my laptop and the multiple browsers I use there - it's much easier to know where I filed something this way, and find it again. Also, I prefer tags to folders.

In somewhat relatable thread some people reported problems which pinboard faced recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30424671 with dead support and unstable archiving

> 2. Shiori: Save bookmarks, archive them or use it like pocket.

Thanks for the rec. I've been looking for a pocket alternative. Just a simple bookmark manager that can archive articles. Ideally a desktop app and work offline too. None of that self-hosting stuffs.

I will give Shiori a try.

edit: Never mind. This is not what I'm looking for.

The reason behind self hosting these services is you want these service to be available across all your devices. With desktop app all the bookmarks will be available only on your workstation not on mobile.

Ideally these should be hosted on Raspberry Pi which can run 24x7 and does not consume much power. But I would not recommend doing this setup unless you are hosting bunch of other services.

I just don't understand these tools. If someone stores bookmarks - why not put them into a text file - one line per bookmark, and then search with grep.

Or put them in the browser bookmark store and then search using the built-in search?

I feel silly that I never thought of this as a solution. My life may change starting today!

But you are loosing title of the webpage if you are bookmarking this way which is quite important while searching.

You can put titles, comments, and tags on the same line if you want.

That's pretty clearly an extra step that people want to avoid by using tools like these.

I thought the Shiori project was dead. Great to see it's got a new maintainer. A new release also dropped after 2 years. [1]: https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori/discussions/376

If anyone is looking for a hosted solution for bookmarks, I've been building devmarks.io on the side for the past few months which automatically syncs GitHub stars, Twitter likes, Hacker News favorites, and Pinboard.in bookmarks into one central location. Bookmarks can be added manually. I also retrieve extra metadata for developer-centric sites (think: number of forks and stars from GitHub repos, version numbers from PyPI, publish date from dev.to articles, etc). I automatically keep all of the bookmark data up to date once a day and back up the content in a readable format without ads or annoying pop-ups. I'd love to hear any feedback if you try it out!

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