Raindrop: All-in-One Bookmark Manager | Hacker News Reader

Raindrop: All-in-One Bookmark Manager

raindrop.io

198 pointsmemorable78 comments

For me collecting bookmarks is part of a larger activity that involves any information I want to gather for use later on. Bookmarks is usually about assembling a reading list or collecting resources on a topic. I used to think the larger activity was note-taking, but I'm realizing that's not really it either. The activity is something very general like "collecting information". Collecting, notes, bookmarks, quotes, transactions, events, equations, etc.

I built a service to solve this problem [0], but I'm not sure how to communicate what it is. Does it collect and organize bookmarks, yes. But I also use it to track of my spending, do my budget, keep a work log, make financial projections, manage tasks, send myself reminders and digests of all the above content.

[0] https://tatatap.com

This is something approaching a general personal assistant. A few notes:

My immediate worry is that this is not general enough. A tool like this is one I really want to integrate into my other tools - Obsidian, PushOver, etc.

Pricing was an immediate turnoff for me. The demo auto-converts and I don't trust you enough to go for that.

It seems like my data is very locked in. Again, not enough trust here.

I clicked the link because I want something like what you mentioned. But your landing page showed a programming language and you lost me.

And I'm a developer.

You're not selling a syntax. You're selling a solution. The homepage should be selling me on what you're solving, not the syntax to do it.

Your comment reminds me of the "Collections" feature in Microsoft Edge, where you can collect a group of related URLs and notes together. I haven't used Edge in a while, but I recall I used it a few times and it was a better experience than the regular "bookmark something and forget about it until it bit rots" which I've never been fond of.

Now I wonder, can I have "Collections" on Firefox?

I used it for a year until maybe 12 months ago. The one thing that made me leave was that everything was juat slow enough to irritate me. Not crazy slow, but not very responsive either. When looking for a bookmark in a folder and each folder takes a couple seconds to load, then your browse becomes tedious.

I like that there's a good export function though, being able to be non committal to a tool is a prime feature IMO

Have been using raindrop for a couple months. Maybe it varies by collection size or location, but I rarely experience a request that takes more than a sec to complete.

Thats still two orders longer than it should take

It should take 10 milliseconds?

10ms to look at the bookmarks in a folder sounds slow to me. Are you querying network for the folder contents every time you open every folder?

Most things should complete in 16ms or less. Preferably less, some people have monitors with faster refresh rates than that.

Who cares about screen refresh rate? It’s not a FPS, if’s a webservice for bookmarking. If they can stay under 100ms, everyone would be fine. 16ms is starting to flirt with the limitations of your eye, without even taking into account info processing

I also stopped because the extension was slow and unusable if you have a lot of tags

Yes. It is slow. This is precisely the reason I stopped using it.

Shameless plug but I’m working on a visual organization and bookmarking tool and feedback and input from someone like you would be crucial!

https://www.bleep.is

That's the reason why I stopped using it too. It looked pretty but I didn't feel productive because of the laggy-ness

I shilled this yesterday as well, but anybox (https://anybox.cc) might be for you, that's what I am using currently. It's native on iOS/Mac, syncs with iCloud and is very keyboard centric with Command Palette, Quick Open, etc.

No connected cloud SaaS subscription service (though there is an iAP with one-time purchase option) or other bells&whistles, just a good simple native app that does what I want it to do

I don't trust anything with CC domain :{

Why? Is it mismanaged? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.cc

> The .cc domain is preferred by many cricket and cycling clubs, as well as churches and Christian organizations, since "CC" can be an abbreviation for "Christian Church" or "Catholic Church". Some open-source/open-hardware projects, such as the Arduino project, use a .cc for their home pages, since "CC" is also the abbreviation for "Creative Commons", whose licenses are used in the projects.

I used Notion for some months, and this is why I stopped using it. It is too slow.

Edit: Notion has no one-click exit options. That's also a bummer.

Funny you should say that, I had the same experience, and when talking about that with a friend he told me that he never had any speed issues.

Raindrop servers located in Germany. Response time can be a slow if you too far away geographically. But we use caching intensively so it should not be a problem. Can you check again please?

Looks nice. Bookmarked it with Pinboard.

Is pinboard still a thing? I've an account but haven't used it for ages. Maciej seems to have left twitter, http://blog.pinboard.in resolves to a placeholder page. Thought it was abandoned at this point.

Still a thing. There's an excellent iOS app for Pinboard made a third party developer, called Pins. It was just updated in 2022.

https://get-pins.app/posts/pins-v2022.1/

I don't see a placeholder page at https://blog.pinboard.in/ I see the most recent blog post. It happens to be a couple years old, but Pinboard is good enough as it is. I didn't subscribe for monthly product blog posts.

Thanks for the recommendation; just purchased Pins. I was using Pinner, but was not happy with it.

I wasn’t expecting the app to be that good! Great recommendation

Man, I love his writing.

> It helped in this process that I was in Japan, since I could do most work at night while my US/European customers slept or wept into their phones or whatever it is people do at night nowadays.

Why the heck are there no screenshots on that site? Not even in the home page?

I do not understand how many developers forget that the easiest way of converting potential buyers is showing a picture of your GRAPHICAL user interface. One of the best sales boost vs time investment you could ever do for your app, takes literally 15 seconds to do.

Sorry, I'm not interested enough to go chasing an App Store link (there's none) or if you shared one in a blog post.

Apparently it is, because Pinboard has taken over my search results for certain queries.

He didn't "seem to have" left Twitter. He announced he was leaving Twitter for a year, about 6 months ago. It's literally the first tweet on his feed. blog.pinboard.in resolves to the Pinboard blog. Pinboard works great; I use it daily.

Pinboard works great for some. For others it doesn't work at all, and, unlike you, we mere mortals don't have Maciej's cell number. :-)

The most grating part is where he ignores support mails, Twitter DMs etc. completely, over many, many months, but drops in on HN to talk about Pinboard, still ignoring you in that very thread.

Really, this hasn't been going on for six months or so, this has been this way for years and years.

I've recently read on HN that it depends on which server your user account is located on, so I guess we can both be correct. Just open accounts until it works for you. :-)

I don't know about anyone else's Pinboard experience and am not denying anyone's experience, but I use it pretty much every day (I'm surprised by how often I use it) and I've never had a support request. Wait, that's not true, I once asked him to change the way tweet indexing worked, and he ignored me. But other than that: nothing.

Yeah I did not check his first tweet, I just don't see his tweets on my feed so I assumed he left. I've always loved his writing style and humor so his absence was obvious.

Blog still loads a "Ubuntu Apache hey you managed to install this" page for me. (https://link.ekin.dev/scKR1f) Don't know why.

Glad that it's still alive and kicking though.

You've somehow hit the http:// version of blog.pinboard.in. Chrome won't let me get to that page, but Safari will. The URL is https://blog.pinboard.in.

I used my pinboard account to remember kippt (YC S12, closed 2015) - https://blog.ycombinator.com/kippt-yc-s12-launches-inc-the-w...

Mentioned several times in yesterday's discussion of bookmarking services:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848210#31856598

The NewsBlur RSS reader just added support for Raindrop.io, allowing you you to share a feed item and have it saved in Raindrop with categories and tags.

https://forum.newsblur.com/t/feature-request-support-for-rai...

If you use RSS it may also appeal to you that Raindrop supports creating public RSS feeds from collections.

I noticed that! I was so surprised but so happy!

This is fantastic.

Open source apps? Check

Reasonable ways to get my data out? Check

Sane pricing with sufficient demo? Check

This app is going to be my go to example for how to sell an app well.

Raindrop snapshots and indexes most things you bookmark with it. It also has an API and integrations with ITTT.

There are desktop and mobile apps as well.

I used to live by chromes syncing bookmark feature but it wasn't always easy to get content bookmarked in chrome on my phone especially.

Now, anything which can be shared on my phone (with the share button) I can send to bookmark and be done with it.

My biggest gripe is that the search is direct and doesn't provide much wiggle room in finding what you're looking for. Super handy though if you can remember a key phrase from the article.

Hi! I’m the creator of Raindrop. Feel free to ask anything!

This is a great bookmark manager. I have used many other solutions in the past and Raindrop provides the proper functionality you would expect from a bookmark manager after years of use I have never ran into any limitations or frustrations.

I use Raindrop but really wish they had support for share extensions in their macOS app. That way I could get rid of their toolbar button and just use the share button instead on Safari.

Native macOS app is on the way! Hope to complete it this year

Love it. My favorite bookmark manager.

For me it's much more effective to bookmark blog posts I've found interesting to re-read later than to Store things I may eventually read (which rarely happens).

Worth checking out Bookmark OS as well for a bookmark manager https://bookmarkos.com

Scrapyard, a WebExtension ScrapBook revival: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapyard/

I largely stopped bookmarking stuff altogether, and now simply save a website as a PDF file in a folder structure that is ordered by broad subjects.

Works fine for over a decade now.

Bonus: on MacOS you can search through stored pdf files very easily.

What about on mobile? Never mind I remembered https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pdf-search/id1303227688

Raindrop offers best in class bookmarking. 1) Highlights on webpages. 2) IFTTT integration. 3) Permanent archives for paid users. 4) RSS feeds for bookmark collection. Brilliant and HIGHLY recommended!

I'd be down with this if it used the OS sync (iCloud / Google Drive etc) and wasn't a subscription. As it stands, it looks like it charges monthly just to use a sync that I can't trust.

I am using Raindrop and it syncs seamlessly between all my devices despite not ever paying for it.

Free tier?

You can sync with as many devices you want. No such limitation even in Free. You can also connect sync to any other service through IFTTT for free.

But yes backup to Dropbox & Google Drive is premium feature.

Any chance to add OneDrive in the future?

Absolutely. Will be available in next month

I’m working on one:

https://github.com/Daniel31x13/link-warden

I just use Zotero for bookmarks. No need to worry about deadlinks (seemingly charged for in this app) as a copy it taken at time of ingestion.

I made my own little solution to this problem too: https://linksort.com

I love this! Do you have some sort of mobile, PWA app?

Thanks! On mobile, I just open the page in the browser. There's a Safari extension that works on mobile for iOS that enables you to save links [0]. I haven't bothered to get the Chrome extension to work on mobile yet.

[0] https://linksort.com/blog/safari/

Is there a way to export data in some viable format?

There is a Backup feature [1] that saves/exports to a Netscape bookmark format file locally or to Dropbox or Google Drive.

I save to Dropbox, and have a cronjob import it into ArchiveBox to create a local backup of sites [2].

1. https://help.raindrop.io/backups/

2. https://www.ecliptik.com/bookmarking-with-raindrop/#archivin...

Thank you, my first question was "How do I hook this up to ArchiveBox."

Export available in HTML and CSV format. What other format you interested in?

Please open source this and then add features like Google Drive/Dropbox backup, etc. as enterprise.

BrainTool[1] is a similar bookmarking extension that is open source[2] and syncs data to a plain text file (org-mode format) on Google Drive.

[1] https://braintool.org [2] https://github.com/tconfrey/BrainTool

Looks very nifty. This is definitely more in line with what I was looking for.

Raindrop web, mobile, and desktop apps are on Github [1], none of the repos have licenses though. It has support for Dropbox and Google Drive backups [2].

1. https://github.com/raindropio

2. https://help.raindrop.io/backups#automatic

Is this inspired by inkdrop.app?

Raindrop in development since 2013. So probably not :)

That landing page is fantastic

Hmmm... this is interesting!

Just use the notion clipper instead. Used this before but didn't provide much improvement on other solutions.

You're comparing apples to oranges. Raindrop doesn't need to be installed (on desktop, different thing if you want to use their app on mobile). And it lets you categorize your stuff in folders _and_ tags and give each of them a representative icon. I've using this as a complement to the 'Saved' feature of Feedly and frankly despite the web ui being a little clunky it works really great.

All those are simple to set up in Notion. Both run via web app and can include categories, tags and additional information. They certainly target different audiences, but in my experience Notion isn't missing anything Raindrop has, it just adds more functionality. Raindrop works well, no doubt. It just doesn't add much functionality to browser based bookmarking.

I don't see the appeal of the bookmark manager either. I use Joplin's webclipper with tags and reference manager (Zotero) for academic work.

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