Show HN: We made an awesome way to browse and search your Chrome bookmarks. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We made an awesome way to browse and search your Chrome bookmarks.

stashmarks.com

88 pointsbwm60 comments

Great work guys! not something I would have originally seen myself using, but having now tested it out I can see this replacing my bookmarks bar! Search could do with improving but I'm sure you'll sort that ;) any chance of viewing bookmarks that are the union or intersection of two tags/folders? I think that is something that would change how I organised my bookmarks, but would be useful to me personally (and I'd bet a whole bunch of other users).

Union/intersection could be quite useful for me too, FWIW. Might confuse the whole tag selection UI side of things (with requiring a 'clear selection' or 'clear this selected tag' type functionality too—just my $0.02.

Cool idea, chrome/ium bookmark manager is definitely a pain point. But I can't tell, is this a local extension, or does it upload bookmarks and stuff to your server?

Exactly my concern. But judging from some of the other comments it is indeed uploading your bookmarks.

I'm sorry to say, but I consider bookmarks slightly private, and I wouldn't want just any company to look over my shoulder and read all the pages I bookmark.

While the product seems awesome I'm going to have to pass.

Excellent work. I've wanted to have better bookmark management in Chrome for a while now. Plus the design is beautiful.

Okay, I know I'm joining the choir here, but THANK YOU. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU. This is EXACTLY what I need. I am so sick of the omnibar not being able to find websites I've bookmarked because it can't search the HTML of the website. I don't want to use evernote either, it needs to just work.

Definitely awesome. I'm surprised that all of my bookmarks say "This bookmark is being indexed". Surely you've already indexed a lot of them as they probably overlap with other Hacker News users. Do you index every bookmark for every user or can you detect dupes?

This looks great. Will try it out.

Just FYI -- I found the shaky window upon inputting an incorrect password very annoying and disorienting. I just wanted to reenter my password but wasn't able to because the window was still shaking.

Just turned that off :)

Cool. It could be a useful visual metaphor as long as the shake was smaller and didn't last as long (didn't affect usability).

So I created an account and the site has now been stuck on "We're uploading your bookmarks." for the past 3 hours at the bar about 3/5 of the way done.

Edit: I have since refreshed and now it's stuck at 0.

I had the same problem, but what fixed it was I uninstalled it and installed it direct from the webstore (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kdcfbakjhnnjcjdcle...) After doing that it worked like a charm.

Not a big bug, but... after login, it said it was uploading my bookmarks, and then said I didn't have any. Though, going back to the home page, it showed me my bookmarks. Just a heads up. Otherwise, looks cool.

I've been looking for something like this lately, it really fills a need for me!

But you really REALLY need to modify your icon. There are a million bookmarked shaped icons in this world, and for some reason no-one ever incorporates a mark with the bookmark icon so that it can be differentiated. So now on chrome I have 2 bookmark icons that look identical (the other is for 'read it later'), and two other ones that relate to bookmarks but are stars. Great.

Hmm, what if we made it orange like the logo? would that fix it?

This is fantastic! I've got so many damn bookmarks that I don't know what to do with them. Have you got any plans for importing bookmarks from pinboard/delicious?

This looks really nice, but I'd like to hear what the account is required for. I'm not happy with the idea of another third-party having a peek inside my bookmarks.

Maybe accounts shouldn't be strictly required, but would permit a fuller range of service? At any rate, I've hit a brick wall, because I am hesitant to go any further.

I understand your concern, and to be honest we thought about this a lot when making the product. The reason we upload your bookmarks to our server is so that we can download the html, index it and display excerpts in the timeline. For further information, you can read our privacy policy here: http://stashmarks.com/privacy

Thanks for your reply; I suspected as much. Well, I hope there aren't too many people like myself who will be turned off by the account creation step. However, I'm going to have to sit out this round until a decentralized option is available from you guys. Nice product, all the same!

I installed the extension, saw the account creation form, and uninstalled the extension. I agree, I don't need another server somewhere downloading the pages I bookmark. Some of them are even on the intranet at work. Could this work entirely within the extension? Or could I opt out of the HTML-search feature and use the other features?

I stopped installing at the request for "your data on all websites". I didn't see anything in the privacy policy that explains why and how far "my data" travels. Could you explain that a bit more?

Otherwise I'd love to try it out - I periodically bemoan the suckiness of bookmarks.

I don't care about privacy, but I hate to register and give out my email address if I don't feel it's absolutely necessary to use the product (and if it is, then only if I need the product will I register).

I'm not sure why I hate registering so much (yet another password to remember (or the risk of using the same password on all websites)? or is it completely irrational?) -- but I do, and I guess I'm not the only one.

I hate to go off topic, but what browser were the screenshots made in? I love the clean border/top bar.

Kudos to Kerem Suer for releasing this awesome freebie those shots were based on http://dribbble.com/shots/395812-Chrome-freebie-PSD-

Are you guys down under the load?

It cycles on the "uploading bookmarks" page for a couple of minutes (I only have 50 or so!) and then

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.

If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

They are under major load - just check out the tweet stream: https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/stashmarks

Awesome works guys! It's a shame that I stopped using bookmarks years ago, cos I could usually google the result much quicker.

Though this UI might change that! Will deffo try it out!

Any thoughts on twitter favs, which a lot of users (including me) misuse as a booking marking service.

Thanks! No plans yet, but there is an API which you can use to post bookmarks to.

I couldn't find another way to contact you, so here goes. There's an extraneous apostrophe in "This bookmark is pending download, until then it's summary will not be available". In fact, that comma should be a semicolon.

Thank you for creating a service I needed.

Oh yes, good spot. Thanks for checking it out.

Anyone have this working in Linux? I get the error, "Sorry, we couldn't connect to your browser." I have the extension installed and enabled.

UPDATE: Seems to be working when installed from the Chrome Web Store, rather than the link on the site.

I'm on Windows and this fixed the same issue for me.

Thanks for reporting this, we are looking into it.

Looks great! If I can begin asking for feature requests, I never noticed how many of my bookmarks lacked appropriate tags :) Would it be possible to add or edit the tags of the bookmarks in future versions?

Yup this is definitely a possibility.

Beautiful service - I've wanted this for a while. My bookmarks all show up, but when I search for anything I get no results. Looks like you guys still have a few kinks to work out...

Thanks! It's probably still indexing you're bookmarks, we're working on it.

Looks really awesome. I want to note I had to restart Chrome to get it to work though (before it was hanging at the 'we're uploading your bookmarks' part).

Great job. Looks like you're getting hammered with traffic right now, but I'm curious how this holds up with a few synchronized instances of Chrome.

as long as you have the extension installed, everything you bookmark will be available in the service, regardless of which instance of chrome it came from.

Right - but I am curious about how Stashmarks handles conflict resolution, if it does. I naively assume it simply de-dupes URLs, meaning unexpected things could happen with multiple Chromes that aren't running sync or have updates queued while working offline. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

(I also agree with the comment below that it's an edge case for most users, especially Chrome sync users.)

Is this something that you would see happening on a regular basis though? how often do you bookmark the same thing multiple times in different instances of Chrome where at least 1 is offline? I agree that this is a theoretical issue that these guys should deal with, but in all practicality I can't foresee this ever being an issue with a real life user...

URLs uniquely identify bookmarks, if two chromes have a bookmark with the same URL but different titles/tags, stashmarks will show whichever was synced first.

Right - I'm finding that this behavior (or something related to identification) makes it finnicky to update title/tags, and changes I make in the browser don't always seem to apply, even after resetting the connection.

If I edit a URL, stashmarks doesn't reflect the change in the UI, at least when the original is still pending download. Looks like it's actually changed internally.

Also, I can't delete (or edit) a bookmark in stashmarks that I no longer have saved in my browser. Recreating it and deleting that does nothing, even when logged out and then in.

Hope these critiques are helpful.

Clearly, these are all edge cases, and overall your service is impressive.

Thanks for the feedback, it's very helpful. We're aware that there are still a couple of quirks with the extension. We'll try to get some management in the web app soon. In the meantime if you're still having problems, feel free to mail us at support@mech.io.

Hey, How long does it take for the bookmarks to upload? been taking a while now...

So far so good. Although could we get a more logical hierarchy? I would like to see my 'favourite' bookmarks at the top somehow.

Your site is on the brink of going down, guys. Not there yet, but I get the occasional server error.

Might want to make sure it stays up. :)

cheers, it was our search feature that was killing performance, we've had to put it a dumber search for now.

A little beside the point, but you have one of the best marketing sites for a HN project I've seen in a long time.

Looks great. Will definitely give it a go. One thing to note, your "Forgot password" link appears to be broken

Nice work guys! I'm getting some error though. I think you guys should pump it up the dynos :)

Just did!

Looks cool, thought of doing something similar myself. Why don't you charge like pinbord?

I can only get a cogwheel and can't find any support link.

This is pretty cool. Does it work on safari?

sorry, it's Chrome only atm. But if enough people ask for it, we'll build a Safari extension.

As much as I wish to see Google Chrome (and Firefox) update their bookmarks manager....I cannot really trust a third party service for my local bookmarks.

great. the stock search crashes my chrome every time.

Hey OP This looked really cool, so i installed it. Then it asked me to log in, and I uninstalled it right away. I want a nice bookmarks-handler, but i dont wanna log in to your shit.

But you made the effort to sign up for a HN account purely to post this comment? http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=xqo

Fair play you might not want to log in but the whole point in this service (I believe) is that it's synced across all of your Chrome instances, hence the need to sign in.

Alternative question (assuming their gonna start charging because otherwise they're operating a going-out-of-business model), would you pay for this if they were to make it a lightweight plug in that doesn't require signing in and doesn't sync across your various Chrome instances?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com