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Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#332

Post by ethagnawl »

Cyph0n wrote: post #185

I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection. For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot o…

Firefox's bookmarks are _mostly_ great. I keep running into an issue when re/naming folders, though. I'll type a few letters and the dialog will close. So, if I was intending to type "a very interesting topic", I'll wind up with something like "a very int". This has been happening for years and I should really submit a bug report...

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#333

Post by stonelazy »

Cyph0n wrote: post #185

I have a ton of bookmarks, but I use them passively. From my experience, Firefox is the undisputed king of making sure anything you type in the address bar will be instantly checked against your bookmark collection. For instance, maybe I'm looking for a PostgresSQL tutorial. I start typing "postgres" and one of the bookmarks I forgot about from several months back appears. This approach has ended up saving me a lot o…

Infact, we have a similar tool in Chrome as well.. One that searches across your bookmarked and open tabs of the browser. Its truly useful. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-tabs/jnjfein...

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#335

Post by threepipeproblm »

At some point, it occurred to me that almost all of the bookmarks in my ever-expanding collection really represented "to do items" more than "reference items".

As others have said, most things can easily be searched as needed. But I was using bookmarks as placeholders, saying "I wanted to read x later", in most cases... sometimes other things.

So I started treating bookmarks as various categories of todos. I do have a reference folder, but it has less than a hundred items. I often use those only passively -- i.e. when typing into the address bar, the starred link will come up first.

All the other links are sorted into categories such as "files to download", "new articles", "new buyables" and so forth.

Now that I think of Bookmarks as deferred work, it has changed a lot of habits. My total number of bookmarks has slowly dropped, and I tend to handle more stuff as it comes, or not at all -- or at least to be more conscious of bookmarks as a cost.

An unexpected benefit has been a feeling of mental satisfaction, after closing a lot of semi-forgotten, open loops. I now think a big unorganized pile of bookmarks can represent a real liability, whereas if you actually go through all those links and delete the weaker ones you get a concentrated pile of goodness. You hit a point where you'd rather read your remaining bookmarks than most news feeds.

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#337

Post by ekianjo »

Houshalter wrote: post #76

Of course, and I'm surprised many people don't. Chrome handles bookmarks well, automatically syncing them between different machines you are signed in on. I used to have them nicely organized into different folders but now it's a bit of a mess... It's especially useful to deal with tab explosion. Control+D and you can just save all your tabs in a single folder (and never look at them again.) The biggest problem is li…

> The biggest problem is linkrot.

I am not using such service, but isn't there a way (i.e. addon) to generate a copy of the page you bookmarked in order to remedy to that kind of issue ?

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#338

Post by sireat »

Houshalter wrote: post #76

Of course, and I'm surprised many people don't. Chrome handles bookmarks well, automatically syncing them between different machines you are signed in on. I used to have them nicely organized into different folders but now it's a bit of a mess... It's especially useful to deal with tab explosion. Control+D and you can just save all your tabs in a single folder (and never look at them again.) The biggest problem is li…

For linkrot pinboard Archive is one way to deal with.

Funnily although I pay for the service I am yet to actually use the archive!

Some anecdata on linkrot:

I started paying for the archive about 3 years after starting on pinboard.

This was about 10 years after starting my bookmarks on Delicious later imported to pinboard

13166 of your bookmarks have been archived, representing 64% of your collection.

This consumes 11.82 G of disk space.

7491 bookmarks have not been stored due to errors:

not found 964

bad request 4

unauthorized 5

forbidden 113

gone 17

rate limited 3

server error 6251

bad gateway 14

unavailable 78

Re: Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?

#339

Post by scholia »

ekianjo wrote: post #337
Houshalter wrote: post #76

Of course, and I'm surprised many people don't. Chrome handles bookmarks well, automatically syncing them between different machines you are signed in on. I used to have them nicely organized into different folders but now it's a bit of a mess... It's especially useful to deal with tab explosion. Control+D and you can just save all your tabs in a single folder (and never look at them again.) The biggest problem is li…

> The biggest problem is linkrot. I am not using such service, but isn't there a way (i.e. addon) to generate a copy of the page you bookmarked in order to remedy to that kind of issue ?

You can just save the pages in MHTML format (so each page is a single file) and keep them in "read later" folders. Or you can use one of the services that saves pages online....
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