Anybody have problems with bookmark organization like me?
What tools do you use to manage bookmarks and saved links? Do you wish there was something better out there?
Most of the time I used bookmarks to either "read it later" or to "look it up again". In both cases I often desperately tried to find a specific bookmark in a collection of unsorted crap. After organizing them into topics / folders / subfolders, it worked a bit better, but I still had the same problem: How to find the one piece of information I'm looking for in a whole bunch of unsorted content? And what if that has changed or become unavailable somehow (except via archive.org).
These days I use a knowledge collection (flatnotes, but Notion, Obsidian or Logseq would work just fine). If a bookmark is only short content (let's say an interesting git solution or a quick fix for something), I immedeately "extract" this piece of information into my knowledge base in a well organized markdown with headlines including a reference to the URL. If it is a "read later" thing, I invest at least 2 Minutes to write a short summary (2 sentences), what the article is about and what I expect it to help my with.
This has proven to work MUCH better to organize "bookmarks" and informational content. Bookmarks are just for backup now.
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Now I keep it to the bare minimum:
1) Favorites bar: up to 10 websites I visit on daily basis.
2) Inspiration folder: where I put things I like. 330 as of today. Website layouts, painters, dev blogs, Youtube videos, anything that has good vibes. That's the only criteria. I make it an effort not to add any subfolder. The only exception is "Favorite projects" which is my little Hall of Fame for quality content. https://ciechanow.ski/ is up there.
3) Trashcan folder: where I place temporary bookmarks I don't care about and will delete in the next few days.
I periodically export my bookmarks so I don't feel guilty when I delete entries from the browser. You could do the same. Put the exported files in a usb stick and forget about them.
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One of the better ideas I’ve heard is just put a little bookmarklet in your browser that does nothing other than displays a message like “saved” or “added to read later.”
Gives you the dopamine hit of pretending like you’re going to read it later without the hassle or disappointment of never actually doing it.
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Sounds like a fun hobby!
Tell me more about your hoarding system.
As @sandreas said, try to extract context from these links. Like if there's some workflow or high level explanations in the page, a quick summary would help greatly when attached to where you noted the link.
For me links serve three primary purposes. Quick access, interesting resources, and snippets of informations. For the first kind, they might as well be in my browser. The wiki style repository is for the second one. And for the third, I'd rather add them to my notes, citation style. Meaning, I extract the relevant information as a note and add the link as the source.
I don't use bookmarks in any of the browsers because I use different browsers and devices and they don't all sync and I actually don't want them to sync or sign in which can become a time sink.
If it's that important *today*, I manually save "One-liners & Links of the Day" chronologically month to month in a hand-coded HTML file which is my home page which can easily be accessed from all devices and browsers. If I go back in the chronology and frequently access a link, I might put it at the top of the home page under "Favourites / Recents / Frequents."
To answer your question, yes: I have problems with bookmark organization.
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- Quick access to commonly used links. For this, I built https://multi-launch.leftium.com
- Saving a link for future reference. Often I want to also save plain text notes for future reference, so find myself using https://simplenote.com
I have also used https://www.bkmks.com to save links.
I'm working on an app that will help save and organize everything: bookmarks, notes, and tasks.
It's a simple flat list of links that you annotate with a description for better search. The killer feature is that it works with Firefox's keyword search. I can enter `go gith prof` in the url bar and hit enter. Since there is only one entry that matches (with description 'github profile'), I'm immediately redirect to that link.
Regardless what you pressed, you should always get back to the help / start screen by pressing 'h'. (Make sure not to have focus on an input field)
1. You can solve the "remember random thing" problem once and for all.
2. Such tools usually have efficient capture workflows that let you capture now and organize later.
3. Note-taking applications tend to be more flexible and featureful than bookmarking applications.
The main downside is that browser integration can suffer, but you can usually find companion extensions for capturing notes at a minimum.
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For anything useful, I summarize the content in my own words, and it goes as a paragraph or three in one big doc with a header and the source link.
Anything I want as-is for a long time, becomes a pdf file.
Where I use bookmarks heavily is at work. 99% links are internal and become instantly useless the day I leave.
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My email is ovief72@gmail.com Thanks again
My email is ovief72@gmail.com Thanks again
There are sources and a docker image available to do this, but the missing piece seems to be that it requires a mozilla account server.
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver
https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs
https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
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The thing that solved bookmark annoyance for me is having them actually synced between all my devices. Having bookmarks trapped on specific devices is very annoying.
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- a built-in RSS reader
- an easy-to-use tagging feature that you can use from the browser extension
- a nice text-to-speech reader — on the elliptical machine I listen to articles that I've saved for that purpose from Twitter, HN, etc.
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You don't even have to manually bookmark, in fact. It automatically learns what is important to you and surfaces the correct link on search. It has a ton of other knowledge management features too.
At home I just have a few I use for convenience for the sites I use often.
Unfortunately I dont see there is any money or market for a feature like this. Hence there is no incentive for anything like it to be developed.
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You could give https://raindrop.io a look. I tried it briefly when I missed del.icio.us. It didn’t stick for me, but your mileage may vary.
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Raindrop is an interesting alternative, but I have yet to try it.
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I’m going to strawman a bit here, this might not be your issue, but I think it’s useful because this is a common pathology. The tool isn’t the problem. The problem is the underlying FOMO. You can’t read everything. You’re not going to read everything even if you bookmark it in the perfect app.
What if, instead of bookmarking, you scheduled time in your calendar for reading it to the extent you felt you’d extracted optimal value from that resource? How many hours a week would you dedicate? How many pages would that imply?—and how does that compare with your bookmarking appetite?
Anyway the better thing was here all along, it’s just only recently even enabled by multimodal retrieval: screenshots
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The only obstacle you have is this pile of garbage that you can't even categorize without plowing through it once. Just do it. You're not that busy. Once you get the folder tree, it becomes much easier. It also outlines your interests and helps with removing links that are "too much" or "too weak" for a specific folder or aren't really your thing at all.
If a page contains a useful N-liner, it just goes into "one big text file" repo and doesn't get bookmarked.
Saving bookmarks feels productive, it isn't. It is just easier than doing the thing I am saving them to do.
To put it another way, not organizing bookmarks is not a moral failing. Good luck.
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My email is ovief72@gmail.com Thanks again