Gimme Bar: Don't bookmark the web. Save it. Forever. | Hacker News Reader

Gimme Bar: Don't bookmark the web. Save it. Forever.

gimmebar.com

159 pointsaeurielesn76 comments

I use Gimme Bar and love it. I also use Pinboard.

Pinboard I use for pointers to things - GitHub projects that might come in handy in the future, development/design resources, particularly interesting Wikipedia articles, and other things like interviews and magazine articles.

But there's some stuff that I want to keep. I used to have a `~/box` folder on my Mac where I'd keep pictures, quotes, and screenshots of web pages I really liked. I wanted to keep them locally so that I would always have a copy of them. However, there were problems with this. By just keeping pictures as files, I couldn't always easily find where the picture came from (not without coming up with a complicated naming scheme or moving away from the simplicity of just having files in a folder). I kept quotes in plain text, so attribution was difficult for them, too — I needed to be able to capture quotes quickly, so I didn't have time to also store the URL the quote came from. And screenshots of webpages aren't exactly interactive — if I wanted to look at some HTML to see how something was done on the page, too bad. I also didn't have a pretty way to look at all the things I'd wanted to keep. All I had was a Finder window.

I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page. Besides, if I archive the whole page, how can I indicate which image/quote I wanted to save in the first place? Long story short, Pinboard's archiving isn't quite what I want (though, like I said, I've been thinking about switching it on for backing up interviews).

Gimme Bar is basically the best of all those worlds. I can save images, videos, quotes, and site designs. I can easily see where the image/quote/etc. came from. The site gives me a purdy way of looking at them. And integration with Dropbox means I always have a local copy of everything. Gimme Bar lets me have my cake, eat it, and have my cake stored in Dropbox (I may be stretching this metaphor).

Anyway, I really, really like Gimme Bar.

FYI, if you want to recover the origin of those ~/box pictures, they may have the original URL and referring URL stored in their metadata. Anything saved from a web browser should have this information in it.

You can use "mdls" to see it. I put a quick and dirty python library to get and set these values at: https://gist.github.com/2889617 (I use it to backup this data.)

This field can also help you find the source of those random pdf files lying around your disk. And you can query it with spotlight. For example,

    mdfind "(kMDItemWhereFroms = '*ycombinator.com*')"

will find all of those pdf's you saved from ycombinator.

I really wish Windows would store this info in NTFS alternate streams. I'll have to check my files when I get home

> I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page.

Hard drive space is cheap, cheaper than your own time when you discover you want context or perhaps some other choice sentence from that page. The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.

(My own current solution-hack is two parallel systems: manual Evernotes for specific quotes or photos, and an automatic archive system that downloads the entire page: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs So I consult one or the other as appropriate.)

> The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.

Agreed. That's definitely something I'd love to see Gimme Bar do: in addition to showing me the quote I pulled out of the page, also give me the option to see the full page, with the text I quoted highlighted.

Of note: we (Fictive Kin, fictivekin.com) created Gimme Bar. We also created LeakedIn (leakedin.org) which is currently sharing the front page.

Thanks for the busy two days of dev-ops scrambling, friends. (-:

Let's try to keep DDoSing to a lower level than yesterday, though, please. (-:

Congrats!

Many years ago I worked on a similar idea: first a desktop archiver called Dowser, and an online app called Archivd.

If you don't have enough to do (heh) one killer feature is to extract semi-structured data: email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, prices, photos, Facebook "og" metadata, etc. Imagine saving a bunch of apartment listings to GimmeBar, and having it automatically plot them on a map of the city.

Good luck!

We actually have some stuff in place to do things like that.

It's currently limited in scope to things like recipes and a few other things, but it's very much on our radar as being useful.

Damn it, guys, this is very close to the idea I've been working on for a few weeks. Now I'm going to have to go back to the drawing board :)

But at least you have a well-documented API, so maybe I can build something on top of Gimme Bar. Anyway, looks great and can't wait to try it out

Incidentally, good on you guys for the Spanish translation.

Pinboard archives each bookmark as a premium feature. I have used it several dozen times since I signed up.

http://blog.pinboard.in/2010/11/bookmark_archives_that_don_t...

I'm unconvinced. I used FURL, which saved actual web pages. Then FURL was sold to diigo and they killed all that -- actually wiping out everything I saved and just leaving the URL (like a frikkin neutron bomb acquisition!). I'm not going through that again. Good luck otherwise.

If I understood correctly they have an option to backup content to your Dropbox account.

That's exactly how I felt after trunk.ly was acquired. I thought I had the perfect system for bookmarks, only to have it all wiped out from underneath me.

That said, with the Dropbox integration, this looks pretty nifty. I particularly like the library view, which is far superior to the way Evernote displays data.

I setup birdmine.com which does basically the same thing as trunkly if youre missing it :)

Well.. you could use firefox maff extension to save webpages locally (and your local could be in the cloud, or on a remote backup). MAFF are just zipped html/css/js/img.

Here: http://maf.mozdev.org/

MAFF is a single-file format that contains one or more web pages.

    * Save disk space, since MAFF is based on ZIP
    * Include video and audio, WebM, Vorbis, Theora and more
    * Be universal, compatible with Linux and other platforms
    * Use an open format, with no risk of vendor lock-in

Wasn't there a Firefox extension that would save every single page you visited? Disk space is cheap and plentiful now, no reason not to.

A proxy server, such as RabbIT or scache or the OWASP ones, etc, will accomplish that goal without requiring an extension to any browser.

However, I disagree with your premise. Sturgeon's Law applies here: 90% of everything is crud. I can barely remember any of the websites I visited today, let alone any reason why I would want to revisit them.

Hi.

You make a good point. We've gone to great lengths to ensure this doesn't happen. One of those lengths is that you can export your entire library to Dropbox. This protects you against us failing or being stupid in other ways.

"This app will have access to your entire Dropbox."

Uh, no. Why do you need access to my entire Dropbox? That's bad. You should request access only to /Apps/Gimmebar.

(I'd submit this as feedback, but your bottom right 'feedback' thing is broken - on submit, you get a blank page.)

Hi.

You're right. That is bad. We added Dropbox support before Dropbox allowed per-directory sandboxing. We're on it (but we also have a huge number of things to do). This does have a fairly high priority.

Thanks for pointing it our (and understanding).

Like Pinterest, Gimme Bar will quickly fall afoul of copyright lawyers. Copying content outright and re-serving it from your own systems... not good.

Huffingtonpost??... just to name one

If its for your own purposes I don't see why its any different than archive.org. The intent isn't to make money, just archival.

Looks nice, but that dropbox-export is not enough futureproofing for me. When I rely on something like this, I need to be sure it will keep automatically existing even if any one company goes down.

In your case, I should not have to manually initiate the dropbox backup, and it should not rely exclusively on one cloud provider.

So there sould be something like a RAIC (redundant array of independent clouds) and then your service would be provided on top of that.

With those changes (which are non-trivial, unfortunately), I would happily use the service.

How many services do that? I can't think of any.

Yes, there probably aren't any at this time. I'm just outlining my main points of critique to suggest further improvements.

> I should not have to manually initiate the dropbox backup

I'm pretty sure you only have to start it once. After that, anything you Gimme gets put into your Dropbox folder right away. At least, that's how my Gimme Bar works.

I originally thought you had to had to go to Gimme Bar's website each time you wanted to back up, like you said, but recently (maybe a month ago?) files started being automatically put into my Dropbox folder as soon as I Gimme'd them. I'm not sure what happened, but I'm glad about the change.

So, tl;dr: Dropbox backup definitely works the way it should.

As for future-proofing, I think this Gimme Bar does a pretty good job. If Gimme Bar ceased to exist, you'd still have your library in your Dropbox folder. If Dropbox ceased to exist, your Dropbox folder would still be a folder on your computer, and your Gimme Bar library would still be there.

So, for you to completely lose your entire Gimme Bar library, all three of the following things would have to happen:

1. Dropbox would have to shut down, 2. Gimme Bar would have to shut down, and 3. The hard drive on every computer you had Dropbox installed on would have to fail, as would every back-up of every one of those drives.

If you wanted to go to Siracusian lengths, I guess you could install Dropbox's server client on a VPS. That way, you'd have your Dropbox stuff in your own cloud as well as in Dropbox's, so even if all three of the above things happen, you'd still have access to your stuff.

We have an open and pretty well documented API (https://gimmebar.com/api/v1), which is basically what we use to build the Dropbox export in addition to the Instagram, Pinboard, etc. backups. We chose Dropbox because the intersection of our users and Dropbox users is quite high, and it was simple enough to execute.

You could very easily build a simple application to back up all of your data to whatever service (S3, personal server, Some Other Cloud™).

If this comment came up in a customer development interview my notes would read "Likelihood of sale: not a snowball's chance in hell."

Don't talk to me about "forever". There is no forever. There is only "until we get bought and shut the service down."

Fix _that_ problem, and _then_ I'll consider using your service.

They store files on your Dropbox. Granted, there is no guarantee that Dropbox will last forever but there aren't guarantees on most (all?) things lasting forever and Dropbox will sync the files to your local disk.

I'm not really comfortable with giving them access to my entire Dropbox. They don't seem to be using the restricted apps directory, unfortunately.

Seems very like evernote webclipper.

http://evernote.com/webclipper/

I was thinking the same thing. Given I use Evernote to save pretty much everything, why would I need a separate service that does the same thing?

I think their landing page needs to indicate how they are different from Evernote. The ability to 'find cool new stuff' is intriguing - a bit like Stumbleupon + Evernote then?

Also there needs to be a way to contact someone and/or ask questions and/or provide feedback. An Olark tab would work.

Gimmebar pulls a Readability. When you share content from Gimmebar, it shares a shortlink to the content on Gimmebar, not the source URL. Sure seems like content/value/traffic theft to me.

When you share content from gimmebar, they're no longer sure the original source is still displaying the item in question, or even that the URI chosen was canonical (think the root url on a blog). What choice do they have?

To go a step further, I think you're freeing the person sharing the content prematurely. If I see something funny on cracked.com, and decide to grab that content, upload it to imagur, then share the imagur link… Imagur getting the traffic instead of cracked is on me, not imagur.

i guess they could put a hoverbar at the top of the page when they link to the original content. if there's a 404 or redirect, the user can click the hoverbar to see gimmebar's copy.

i'm not sure how to do it, exactly, but i know it's possible to do this in a way that isn't so... swipey.

How do you know you're seeing the wrong content?

On any Gimme Bar asset page, you'll find a direct link back to the original URL where it was grabbed from. You don't need to use the short link if you don't want to, but we do make it slightly more convenient.

I guess it's the difference between: a) blogging your thoughts about an article and linking back to it, which encourages people to read the original so they know the context for what you've written.

VERSUS

b) quoting all or almost all of the interesting bits from the article, and providing a link to the original.

In the latter case, there is no reason or incentive for the user to visit the source. In the past couple of years I've begun to think this is the wrong way to go about things.

To be fair, the intent of Gimme Bar is to be a personal web-saving tool first, and a "social" tool a very, very distant second.

There are enough tools and applications out there that let you share links and pictures of stuff you like, but not many that are completely focused on ensuring that those things you like stick around in an easily searchable and backup-able way.

What's that? A plugin? JS? Will I be able to install it in Seamonkey in Windows? I can't tell by its web.

The voice is really hard to understand. Too low and the way it reads is annoying.

It seems that you can use Dropbox in some way but I didn't understand if it can save directly on a local folder (no login required) or you have to login every time.

I use ScrapBook to save whole webpages.

I haven't tried it yet but I think you can save webpages to your Dropbox folder and have them everywhere.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/

I thought the video was (relatively) amazing. It was funny and cool and not overly douchy and/or nerdy like other demo videos.

I've been a Gimmebar user for months. Pro user for about 1 month. The redesign (currently available to Pro users) is great.

The difference between Gimmebar and lots of other similar services is your ability to bookmark anything you find, which is great for doing things like a moodboard for a project.

Seems like a cool idea,

I watched the video but it hasn't convinced me why gimme bar is better than my current bookmark system in Chrome with folders etc. to be honest, I quite like my bookmark bar at the top

All the video did was told me that gimme bar is better, but not why it is.

It saves the content so it doesn't matter if the original goes away. FWIW, I learned this from the video, hadn't used the product or even heard of it before.

Seems nice, though a bit slow.

When copying quotes it would be even nicer if you could keep the formatting from the website. Bold text, lists etc. should be preserved when presented on your site.

I thought the screenshot feature could have been a useful alternative, but for certain pages it doesn't really work: http://inoveryourhead.net/20-things-i-should-have-known-at-2... - I'm not sure it can be solved in general. Maybe it is possible to run it through readability before taking the screenshot.

Sorry for the current slowness - we're getting hammered pretty hard on our infrastructure at the moment. We're working on it.

If you really want quotes and things to be presented in the same formatting as the site, you might want to try Citational. It fills a different role than GimmieBar, in that it's meant for one-shot sharing instead of an archive. But it does let you highlight text or an image and show it in context: https://citational.com/v/5mf/15-learn-to-cook

(Yes, I built it... )

Gimme Bar is brilliant. I've been using it for awhile now and can't offer enough applause. I use it for two main reasons: gathering and collecting inspiration (specifically via their discovery stream) and having a visual reference library (as a designer it's great for saving color palettes, fonts/typography, and other resources).

Sign up, connect it to your Twitter, follow some interesting folks, and hit the discovery stream. I'll talk to you in a couple hours.

Evernote + pinterest, right?

Yeah, something like http://clipboard.com/

isn't it just Pinterest? Or can you only bookmark images with pinterest and text with evernote?(not sure, that's why I'm asking)

GimmeBar is fantastic - used it for a while for images & design inspiration; using it now for most of my bookmarks as well (cool Gems/plugins to check out, quotes, bits of articles etc).

Thanks FictiveKin for being amazing :)

(also - syncs via Dropbox to my hard drive. That's forever enough for me)

I use a really hackish perl script to wget, diff, and wget -r websites in this way, because articles disappear way too much for my liking. This product looks wonderful and I'll be playing around with the API as soon as I have a spare moment. Thankyou for this.

Hmm. A few more minutes with this has me a little mixed. I may have confused this with some kind of personal mirror service. Is there a way to mirror an entire page? (Recursively --no-parent is ideal, usually.) Even backing up the plain HTML without images would be suitable. Text is formatted usually.

A great product nonetheless. It will replace a cocktail of pastebins + image/binary uploaders for me, in many cases. The screenshots are most definitely useful. For articles where formatting and sublinks are important, I may need to keep using my silly wget routine.

I like the sound of that Perl script. Have you published it online anywhere?

I look at the page and see nothing but a flash video. Nothing there at all to tell me what the service is.

Are you going to force me to take the time to sit through a flash video to learn about your product? Seems like a very unnecessary barrier to me.

Directly under the flash video: "Save the Web Don’t bookmark the web. Save it. Gimme Bar doesn’t just keep bookmarks; it stores items in your personal library in the cloud. You can even back things up to Dropbox."

Seems to state the purpose and expected usage scenario quite clearly. The Terms of Service at the bottom also has a good description of how they handle Copyright issues which I would think is likely to be the big issue. I.e. if I "save" a favorite video to the site, can it disappear a year later due to some copyright complaint? The answer is yes.

Please create a Firefox add-on. I don't like using the bookmarks bar at all.

This is actually very well done, I've already signed up for the pro account and was happily surprised to find an improved UI waiting for me. Cool!

No About section?

Great idea, I love it. But serious, to all those doing their on voiceovers...BUY A DECENT MIC. They are 30 USD max

It sounds fine to me, and I've worked in pro audio for over a decade. Maybe too bassy for your speakers?

They are 30 USD max

If only :-)

all else aside 'They are 30 USD max' means you and I have different definitions of decent and max. (perhaps you mean acceptable and min?)

Should I move from Delicious to this? What are the advantages of this over that?

looks good... What do the pro accounts offer and how much do they cost?

I used to use LittleSnapper when I had a mac, but now that I'm on Linux, I just take screenshots of stuff. I'll give it a try.

Their backup to dropbox feature is pretty nifty.

I backup to my Google account with my Chrome so I don't see the difference.

There's a huge difference between saving the content itself, and a link to something that is bound to disappear eventually.

Cool, but evernote already does it all.

"...bookmarks are like myspace..." ehm no

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