Hacker News Reader

Comment by HyprMusic | Hacker News Reader

I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks, and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks.

Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks after x days or after I've already visited them once.

All the mockup does is provide another interface for saving the bookmark - but this isn't the problem. The problem is consuming/revisiting the bookmark.

View on HN

I'm the same as you. I've accumulated years worth of bookmarks which I dread organizing, but at least I can search for their titles. My current solution consists of:

* Readability - things I intend to read soon. Works across browsers and devices, and the simplified text-only view is a boon. * Bookmarks - I try to roughly categorize by folders, but mostly use tags. I'm not sure why no other browser other than FF lets me add tags to bookmarks considering that page titles almost never represent contents of the page. That and built-in readability-like functionality on Android are some of the things that are making me switch to FF as a full-time browser again. * Evernote - pages move and die often, which is a problem with Internet as a whole I find. Clipping to Evernote at least ensures access to the page later, and feels a little less archaic than saving the page to disk.

Funny, my use is very similar to yours, just with a different software stack. I use Firefox bookmarks for frequently visited pages, Pocket for read-it-later articles and Pinboard for (tagged) future reference.

I have made a subfolder for the read-later. It's continuosly growing and once in a while I clean up - often just kicking out stuff without reading. It's working nice for just moving the "I might read this later" somewhere. I don't have to think about which subfolder it needs to go in and it's out of the way fast.

One annoying feature in Firefox is that "Bookmark this page" always puts stuff in the last subfolder used. I often end up with bookmarks not just in the wrong subfolder, but also without an idea in which one they have landed. So I create a new bookmark just to figure out where the last one has landed ... sigh

What's strange is that the study reveals exactly these different use cases for bookmarks, but doesn't propose a real solution. I currently have well over 100 things in Pocket, and even more in Pinboard, and many different tab groups open in the background (FF). My problem is not how to store things, but how to get myself to follow through instead of seeking out more content.

Maybe if I created a randomly updating HN-like interface for my 'bookmarks' I would be more likely to follow through. Or a daily email to myself of 5 random links.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com