Yacy is actually a distributed search engine, but I run in 'Robinson mode' as a private peer, to keep it isolated, as I just want a personal search of only sites I have indexed.
Anytime I come across something of interest, I index it with yacy, using a a depth of 0 (since I only want to index that one page, not the whole site). This way, I can just go to my search site, and search for something, and anything related that I've indexed before pops up. I found this works way better than trying to manage bookmarks with descriptions and tags.
Also, yacy will keep a cache of the content which is great if the site ever goes offline or changes.
If I need to browse, I can go use yacy's admin tools to see all the urls I have indexed.
I have been using this for several months and I am using this way more than I ever used my bookmarks.
I think google used to offer something that did this as well as search all your local files, but I think that went the way of all gThings.
You create some rules for topics you want to index and it'll go out and crawl them. Searching through it is a global hotkey away.
I have wished for a while that browser would store the entire page of any bookmark you save automatically, and put a decent search engine on it. I wrote a script once to do it for my bookmarks, and it didn't even take that much space on my hard drive.
Your system could be a Firefox addon, kinda like what scrapbook used to be, but automatic. Even with a note system, and storing metadata, Zotero style, but without the need for the dual setup.
Not what you're going for -- you don't have a list of specifically opted-in 'bookmarks' to browse.
but I have often wanted "wait, what was that site involving X I was looking at maybe last week?"
The offline caching sounds awesome.
Thanks for sharing
If someone is interested, you can download it from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yacy-it/
Limitation: It currently supports only YaCy running on localhost and unprotected. You might have to configure CORS as outlined here -> https://github.com/tecoholic/yacy-it#configuring-yacy
Now I have 10s of 1000s of pages indexed after importing my bookmarks/history, and I'm wondering if it'd be more useful to _only_ index the pages I've visited/bookmarked, or if it'd also be good to crawl those sites further.
I guess one distinction would be whether or not I thought I could use Yacy as a full-time replacement for google/ddg. It'd be nice if I could index "everything", but then have a toggle to search only my bookmarks/history or something similar to that.
Edit : looks like the docker config allow to mount a arbitrary folder , that folder can be shared. I don’t need it to be concurrent proof.
Again, thanks this look nice.
How confident are you that this will keep your bookmarks safe? Losing indexed data might not be such a big concern for a search engine that is intended to re-index everything continuously.
I defnitely felt betrayed when I found out that Firefox automatically deletes old history :/ I guess they think that most users need to trash their profile to fix some obscure bug before that anyway...
A few months in I noticed how powerful this simple system was. When talking with someone else about a tool, github-repo or article I had seen but did no remember the name or title of, finding it back was suddenly a breeze. Since I keep my desktop and mobile bookmarks in sync, it it just a matter of typing in a keword in the address bar in firefox and it shows up instantly!
On desktop, you can limit the search to bookmarks only by starting with a *, which is helpful to avoid browser history etc.
I have really low bar for adding a bookmark now as the mental overhead is so low and it is done notime. It has become the second brain I always wanted :)
A bit primitive, but it works for me.
Reasons:
1. Archives - those tutorials and guides stay when the original pages go 404
2. API - I use the api to automatically post my bookmarks to my blog
3. Full-text search: this is very very useful when needed
4. Social Discovery: Search that niche website / app on Pinboard. It shows lots of other people who found that same thing as interesting. We can then follow them and subscribe to their favourites as RSS feed.https://github.com/klenwell/pinprick
I find it a good way to keep in touch with past bookmarks and do some light maintenance.
I have over 30K bookmarks and add multiple hundreds a month.
Part of the reason for Pinboard's success is the lack of VC pressure for growth. I'm happy to keep paying for Pinboard indefinitely.
I picked Pinboard because the UI is simple but functional. No 30mb blob of JavaScript. It pairs well with todo.txt… now I just need a simple Dropbox-based notes app to complete the trio.
Mail rules can then file them, I can add any relevant notes or hashtags to the mail body at the time I share the link, and the chronological ordering is helpful. Imap search is usually 'good enough' to turn up a half-remembered link or article.
I have been meaning to add an imap script to complement this with something like a simplepage archive, but have never got round to it.
I'm now moved over the Raindrop.io[1], which is another solo-developer outfit, but has had a lot of work put into it. It does all the same stuff Pinboard does (including page archiving but beside the social and public directory things... which nobody uses), but has a bunch of additional features. It has a much more complete API, a well maintained extension, and mobile apps! Definitely worth giving a go.
[1]: https://raindrop.io/
One feature I recently learned was Highlights [1]
You can select a passage of text on the page, then when bookmarked, it'll save the selected text. Allows for multiple highlights. And then visiting the page in the future those texts clips will then be highlighted again.
This way whenever something is bookmarked it's saved in Newsblur and published to Dropbox, which ArchiveBox picks up every hour and saves a local copy and to archive.org.
I was using Magnolia before Pinboard and it went down permanently. Fortunately, at the time, I was doing link blog posts once or twice a week so I was able to recover most of my links with a bit of work.
The interface took a bit of getting used to, but I learned some of the shortcuts, installed Zutilo [1], and ultimately just accepted the fact that I'll have to use the mouse for some things, as everything else about the program makes it worth it.
There was an interesting comment on r/Evernote by a former employee who worked there about why the clipper works so well (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Evernote/comments/fbf8an/comment/fj...), based on acquisitions of other companies, custom code for certain websites, and a willingness to test websites where clipping doesn't work and (eventually) fix them.
However, there are issues with clipping on desktop Safari (occasionally there are bugs for periods of time, until fixes are implemented in an update), and sometimes clipping does break for certain websites (though this eventually gets fixed). I also find searching can take effort to find specific past web clips, though I'm not sure if the services is actually worse than before.
Web clipping is the last reason I'm staying with Evernote, writing as a user who has paid money in an attempt to migrate notes to another service (then finding that the other service was inadequate for web clipping).
Even the simple fact that you can screenshot a part of the screen, annotate it, a toss it on the heap is so awesome. I don't worry about space, I don't worry about finding it. Search is really great on Evernote even picks up the text in images way..... before any tool was doing that.
Also, you can actually save the content of a page to a note (not just a link with an avatar). This is great for recipes that once you found it, you can never seem to find it ever again on google. Having a copy of that particular recipe with the right mix of ingredients I still have laying around. PERFECT!
I used to have a large amount of bookmarks, carefully sorted into folders. I didn't use most of them on a regular basis, and the links broke over time. The end result was a bunch of broken bookmarks.
The combination of autocomplete, history, and web searches seems good enough to find anything I want.
I donate to them yearly for being such a crucial piece of Internet infrastructure (in the historical, not literal, sense)
Locally encrypted, open source, free with no ads or can be self-hosted. And most importantly, its not tied to any particular browser. With xBrowserSync for bookmarks and Bitwarden for passwords, I can browser hop as much as I want.
I, too, am (was?) a long-time paying Pinboard user, but Reading List is just so much less friction. I found myself never going back to look through my Pinboard bookmarks.
Reading List “just works.”
Then I use the web export function there to export it to xml.
I wrote a script that would read that xml and pull (and if not available, fall back to archive.org) and cache (so only new bookmarks are downloaded) the sites, and built an offline version for archival and searching.
It's also a good dumping ground for any kind of interesting snippet, image, or whatever I find interesting. There are some neat little features for occasionally sorting through your "mind" and discarding unused information.
It's not free, but I don't mind because the UI happens to work well for me. It's thoughtful, well-crafted, and I'm happy to support them.
I have been toying with a chrome extension that enables me to add "annotations" to these pages and it helps me find websites based on my note search. It's far from perfect but I realized that I remember my notes / thoughts more than the website url or name.
Unlike other apps that save bookmarks that stay unread forever, Ephemera sets a deadline that the bookmark must be read by. Miss the deadline, and that bookmark is gone.
I’d love for the hacker news community to check it out!
I still do it occasionally, but I'm not longer obsessive about it the way I might have been in the past.
The one and only thing I miss about Delicious is that it was great to see what other people were saving under a specific tag or topic.
Each day has a blank line and a "links for 02022-06-23:" header beginning it.
What I mean by that is if I see a page I want to read later, I need to have it in NetNewsWire to read it; otherwise I never read them. So I subscribe to my Pocket account’s RSS feed, so whenever I bookmark something in Pocket, it’s ready to be started in NetNewsWire whenever I get to reading my feeds.
I’m big on having one destination for all the things I follow. I follow YouTube accounts through RSS as well.
It searches through links in my wiki: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge
Does such a plugin exist?
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-as-org-m... and https://github.com/kuanyui/copy-as-org-mode
- https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html and https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/promnesia/
- https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html and https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasp
The first to quickly copy text from html, the second to see if something is already noted, the third to quickly archive the bookmark. In the past I've used Zotero witch works automatically VERY well (and on deduplicated storage does not consume so much disk space) but since it's a kind of walled-garden in the sense I can't really integrate it in anything else I decide to have a bit less features but hyper-superior integration with org-mode.
My workflow is save for later focused (I tend to save content to read / learn from vs bookmark resources to visit) and now days I’m collecting content in so many different forms (podcasts, video, newsletters, etc). I’ve found that nobody has native support for every content form I save and it’s been a big pain point. We're focusing on nailing native support for all content types / sources and building tools to help you manage the forever growing list of content that can sometimes happen when your library grows!
It’s called Upnext (https://www.getupnext.com), happy to share invites with HNers in search of a tool in this space, email in profile!
these are similar threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22158218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22105561
I personally ended up building my own solution with the following requirements * easy to export or convert later e.g. json * simple to build/maintain e.g. github action + hugo * easy to access from the phone e.g. telegram
These are my bookmarks https://myawesome.dev and this is the template https://github.com/my-awesome/my-awesome-template
it's not perfect but it cover my needs ;-)
I've literally been downloading pages since then to have a local image. I've written various native code tools to extract text, index that and then markup the files with keywords and then create a local search engine back.
SO MUCH is shadow-edited, deleted or lost. It's foolish to rely on ANYTHING online for more than a year or even less. If it matters you must have a full archive.
When PDFs are referenced (e.g. scientific papers - I have 1000s of COVID papers), I download those and index them.
This is also why I never rely on e-books - I order a hard copy because in 20-100 years, it will ONLY be the paper version that will still be around.
https://braintool.org (Chrome)
Both powered by a plain text stores.
We’ve developed Memex to solve for that. It’s an offline first extension for bookmarking and annotating websites, pdfs and youtube videos. Also you can collaboratively curate and discuss them, and it has a mobile app to save and annotate websites. It’s availabe for Chrome/Brave and Firefox (memex.garden)
3min Demo: https://links.memex.garden/3mindemo
But it as a tool is much broader. I use it as my GTD inbox, and for task management, and other notes. The fact that I can simply search for pages that I've clipped (including adding #tags to them, or grouping them) is a lovely subset of what I use it for.
It's a Chrome Extension that let's me quickly search through my Chrome Bookmarks. It's got plenty of hotkeys, and I use it 20+ times a day.
Screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/NxHfxQC.jpg
The entropy of links is staggering. I'm glad to have archives of some of the oldest links.
Nobody reads my Twitter except me, so it works fine.
You share a document with your team. E.g. "best cloud vendors".
Then for that document, each team member installs a bookmarklet, and collectively contributes to the research by submitting bookmarks, search queries, and screen shots.
Helpful if your team is collectively researching vendors, frameworks, etc.
Works well for my individual needs too.
[0] https://www.crestify.com [1] https://www.github.com/dhamaniasad/crestify
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/poster/heklcccecmo...
If I'm not interested enough to read the link now, I almost certainly am not going to read it later.
Sort of the same reason I don't take photos anymore. I never go back and look at them, so it's just a waste of time and a distraction from being really present in the moment.
The user can then curate content via both in-app "post" feature, as well as a chrome extension. Interestingly, the discovery feed will also be built in a way that it allows you re-discover content, because we end up saving a lot of content, but rarely end up revisiting them.
:) The current prototype of mutter (URL: https://mutter.ai) was built as a research exercise. We're working on totally new prototype but with a different set of designs.
- if it's an article related to my interests and that fits for the overall contents I share on twitter - I simply tweet about it.
- if it's code-related (e.g. github repo) - I just "star" it
- if it's something else - it depends what category it is, because I have two bookmark folders in the browser: "4 later" (so that if something seems to be interesting but I don't have time right now to read it) or "saved" folder where I just put something that I would like to have bookmarked (I've also have then nested year sub-folders (as I don't bookmark THAT often that this approach wouldn't be sufficient for me)).
- if something is very important for me, I simply send an e-mail to myself with tagged content so I can easily find it through e-mail search engine later - I have a dedicated e-mail suffix for this (imagine xyz+bookmark@gmail.com) and it automatically goes archived into "bookmarks" folder instead to inbox.
I transferred all of my links to Diigo, which had much the same functionality, but a LOT of extras. Diigo really focuses on the extras and I felt the weren't really interested in the features I considered for Core.
I eventually realized that the guy who originally started del.icio.us was running a service called Pinboard. I checked it out, read his blog, saw how dedicated he was to providing a good service and being attentive to his customers and signed up. https://pinboard.in/ is a fantastic bookmarking service which ticks all the right boxes and doesn't try to be something it shouldn't. If you're tactical in your tagging you should be able to find your valuable links easily.
In recent years I've found that I only visit 5 out so websites with any regularity and everything else is as quick to Google for as to search my bookmarks for.
I've completely given up on bookmarks.
- Notable things that are urgent gets emailed to myself.
- Sites and pages get bookmarked in the browser
- Notes and tasks are added directly into an extension like Notion [0] or Taskade [1] or Pocket [2] and synced to all my devices
----
[0] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/notion-web-clipper...
[1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/taskade-team-tasks...
[2] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/save-to-pocket/nil...
For work I have a wider variety of information. I'm often doing Pentests, so I read up on related research a lot. Since I can't keep every minor detail in my head, I bookmark interesting things in the browser; that's then backed up, but that's about it.
As a typical tech hobby, I run a few home servers and recently got myself an "always on" machine. Now I'm looking at self hosted services my family and/or I could genuinely benefit from. Bookmark sync between my work laptops could be nice, but Yacy mentioned in the top comment is insanely attractive - indexing (+archiving?) beats bookmarking.
You can save the site / pdf (link or archive), engage with highlights, comments, and polls. There's privacy controls. It's searchable. Everything can be organized with tags as well as folders. You can join groups and follow people to discover shared content. Highlights can be shared natively to popular social platforms and observed with analytics. User's can also set a personal promotion with what they share as an added benefit and incentive to provide value.
As a service it doesn't appear to be being actively developed, but it is reliable, isn't too fugly and has the required functionallity (multiplatform/browser/mobile support, good search, read later, tags, highlighting, sticky notes, private and public libraries and archiving for important stuff) in a reasonably easy to use form.
diigo's not perfect by any means - automated tagging suggestions could benefit from ML pixie dust - but certainly the best first stage of research and web page archiving solution I've found (compared to DevonThink, Pocket, Evernote, InstaPaper, A's Notes (and a few others I've forgotten))
If I want to save a page for future reference because it's useful more generally, I actually have a special "References" deck in Anki for that, which has various useful levels of categorization applied.
Similarly, if it's an article I want to queue for serious future reading, I have a "Reading" deck. After reading (and potentially after having been converted to anki notes in the Main deck) notes from the reading deck go either in the Archived deck after reading, or in the References deck accordingly.
It's a nice tool.
I encountered it so much that I built a tool in the last few months to allow sharing of bookmarks natively in the browser. I didn't want to use a new tool to manage my bookmarks; I just wanted to enhance the browser bookmark feature with the ability to share bookmarks.
- captures a tree tab structure (inspired by Tree Style Tab)
- has a text-heavy interface
- is keyboard driven (inspired by Vim)
- keeps data local or syncs to a GitHub gist (no server)
- exports to Markdown
I often hear from others they need something similar, and I thought about finishing it up so others can use it. But my fear is that I made too many personal design choices that nobody else would like, and changing those choices would make myself less happy (but surely make it easier for others to use).
If you are intrigued, here are some screenshots:
- A list of freely available articles, tutorials, book about programming, math and science: https://github.com/bobeff/programming-math-science
- A list of open source games: https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games
Not much different from just having a text file. Easy to backup, can grep keywords etc. Lack of sync is a disadvantage so I sometimes use "note to self" on signal when I want to save something from mobile.
For portability, I use a public Telegram channel that I post interesting links to for later reading. Given the web version doesn't require to be logged in and has a search bar it's very good for accessing everything you have.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/
Also, you can export the data out pretty easily also, which may not be the case with other bookmarking services.
[1] https://mediaonfire.com/blog/2017_07_21_org_protocol_firefox...
It's kind of fun to track my interests over time by counting tag frequency, but I mainly use it out of nostalgia and for the mere constancy of it.
Rather than bookmarks I use Pocket. It’s been very helpful especially for articles and technical websites that I want to be able to reference later.
It's not bookmarking as much as site-marking, and then having your own search engine based on that collection.
Figured it was worth mentioning.
https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/gettin...
They're no good as a long term knowledge base however -- search is too limited.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/groupspeeddia...
If I think I may need to refer to that content again, I'll also 'printfriendly' (convert the relevant content I need to PDF). I do this for 3 reasons, 1) In case I may need to refer to it again, and the website/content is gone. 2) I'm a digital hoarder. 3) I also like to have stuff available locally in case of extended internet outage
[1] https://andirko.eu/wiki/bookmarks
(Edit: typo)
I have an interest in building a "saved item" extraction tool for my reddit accounts that exports them to a bookmark file for offline storage. Same with Hacker News. Though if the tool already exists, please link it here!
I also use OneTab (or similar) to clear up open tabs. I use Pocket just for sending articles to my kobo reader and Instapaper for read-it-later. Also using Materialistic app to quickly save HN articles.
I think the basic functionality of bookmarking will never be obsolete.
I also have several hundred "normal" bookmarks across several folders. Documentation, Hobby, "randomly cool," etc. But I definitely lose a lot of content that I wish I didn't.
I've also recently cobbled together a CLI tool that lets me save discussion threads on Reddit, HN and Stack Exchange. Very much a beginner-level project but here it is in case anyone is interested:
Last bookmarking service I used was pinboard. I still have an account on there but that’s about it.
I use the web and iOS version (through "share") half a dozen times a day.
Gives a simple explorer style folder/bookmark structure. Can be reordered any way you want. Can sync to browsers if you want but I prefer to just use the website.
rewq.app (after opening it once, you could swipe the name on the keyboard. The TAB key next to `q` triggers the auto-complete and completes rewq.app)
I use it making shortcuts to links or lists. Like, music -> ...music..link.. , so on.
When I swipe, rewq<TAB> ? music
The url opens. :-p
FYI ... Also comes with a chrome extension.
If it's something I may want to come back to, or something that I'd be sad if it disappeared from the web, I save it to a synced folder using the SingleFile extension which inlines all content into a single HTML file.
Everything, for example, that I post to Twitter gets scooped up and dropped there
Along with messages sent to a private email address, among other things
For more permanent links, I maintain quite an extensive collection of bookmarks, all neatly organized by subject area and utility.
If i need it again, i either know where it is (part of which research), or can find it with the note search.
Notable things that ai might need in the future go into Notion with (critically) some notes on context and why theyre important. If i xant be bothered to write any notes then its not important enough to be added.
My public feed https://tinygem.org/tomcat/
For more silly things, I created a private subreddit together with my brother. We post things that we find interesting enough to share and re-visit in there, which is quite a nice format.
What I would really like, though, is if i could manage my bookmarks with SyncThing and have good browser integration.
I've always wanted some kind of SyncThing Companion App that provides NextCloud-y features with ST as the backend.
I mostly wanted to be able to categorize bookmarks within multiple tags, and easily be able to save them, using a bookmarklet.
For some pages I will manually use an archive service and include the archived links with the original link.
Bookmarks are just a starting point for easy knowledge management, online research, and collaboration. There's so much more that you could do with it.
But, browser bookmark management ranges from barely acceptable to irritating. Never great, or innovative, like some of these services. I wish the browser vendors would adopt some of this stuff.
I'm just (still) waiting on someone to develop the app which lets me search it.
Delicious → Ma.gnol.ia → Delicious → Pinboard/Instapaper → Raindrop.io
Pros:
1) Hostless, GitHub is the backend
2) works in multiple browsers
3) Has tagging
Cons:
1) No mobile client
2) Search is primitive
In the end I just email myself links and it works a treat. My emails are bookmarks are in the same place
I generally don't open bookmarked pages in chrome, and if I ever did, I'd just use copy+paste.
The furthest I go is using the facilities built into whatever browser I happen to be using.
I don't find myself really in need
In between:
1. Sending email to myself with appropriate keywords.
2. Writing them in Notes app.
3. and private git repo for my personal knowledge bank.
I got all my needs covered.
I send it to myself in the @karaterobot (or equivalent) channel in Mattermost, which is the self-hosted chat program I use. This is exactly equivalent to sending it to yourself in Slack, except that free versions of Slack have a limited history, after which your archive will be lost (or, rather, held behind a paywall). The advantage of this method is that it's organized by time, and searchable, and you can save links, documents, images, notes, etc.
Been working great for me so far, and definitely help me improve my coding skills. One of the things I like the most is that it records the time I downloaded the SingleFile page, which means I can view a timeline of bookmarks. It is nice to visually review over the month what I decided to save, often as a way to reinforce what I learned.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/singlefile/mpiodij...