Ask HN: How to manage my bookmarking habit?

I set up Firefox so that the url bar autocompletes only from my bookmarks. And since years I've been constantly and linearly bookmarking. When something has an outstanding feature, I add a/some tag/s. I maintain areading list in Org mode but I plan to move it to Firefox as bookmarks tagging them as "unread". Maybe I can make a little extension that will add a button to tag them so automatically, and list them in a popup. For retrieval I haven't ever needed anything else than just searching from the url bar.

It's okay that you won't ever return to them. Because one day you'll want to retrieve a specific one and then you're better off with an excess of bookmarks among which what you were looking for, than having an organised list but without what you're searching.

If you are spending toi much time chasing new links on reddit, what works for me is to limit my sources (hn and reddit only for me) and sometimes to have an offline week, proving myself that I can live without being on the top of everything.

You may find this very abstract but from my experience I think it also boils down to what your life priorities are. Having clear understanding of your horizons of focus, as referred in GTD [1] will help in sorting out what is important to you and what is not.

I find it also important to maintain a wont-do list of things that are not important to me (and I thought they were).

Ex: I thought running marathon was important to me. Turns of semi-regular to gym is what is important to me. So any link/article related to marathon, extreme workouts/fitness that I come across is glanced and closed peacefully.

I think this will help you let go bulk of links without causing anxiety. HTH.

[1] http://gettingthingsdone.com/2011/01/the-6-horizons-of-focus

I'm at 11,688 bookmarks now ಠ_ಠ. I'm certain that many of them could be deleted, and periodically I'll scan through a section of the list and delete the ones that are obviously no longer of interest to me.

I started using a CLI bookmark manager called "buku" [0], storing the bookmarks database in a Dropbox folder to get multi-system sharing.

One nice feature is after running a search you get dropped into an interactive buku prompt where you can do further searches, open results in a browser, and edit entries.

My motivation for the switch was that I kept encountering issues (mostly performance) when using a high number of bookmarks maintained by the browser. And then there's the hassle of moving all of those bookmarks if I switch browsers again. It has been a positive experience overall.

[0] https://github.com/jarun/Buku

You are a digital hoarder.

My advice: Delete it all. If you need it bad enough, you'll find it again. It's digital.

With 10K+ bookmarks you'll never organise it.

An alternative (but imo too hard with 10K+) use some kind of hoarding 'zen' approach - look at the link - if it brings you an emotional response - keep, else delete.

If you want to research something in the future, what makes you think your collection of bookmarks will be better than a reading list you find / create on the spot?