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Comment by neiman1 | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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!

Great work!

Thanks a lot!

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