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Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

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Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#1

Post by bluewalt »

As a curious developer, my knowledge is scattered between many external resources I consumed and want to keep at my fingertips: blog posts I read, Youtube videos I watched, Stack Overflow answers I read, Github repos I follow, etc. My knowledge is NOT the notes I took, but these external resources I consumed and loved.

But over time, I forget. I don't know what I know, and as soon as I need something like, I google it. For example, it could be the 10th time I google "efficient logging with Python". I may come across a link I already clicked, or not.

To me, it would be much more efficient to be able to search among all my external resources I already read and decided to keep, because it is limited to quality contents that I have already filtered, and that I already read, so that memory will activate when I read it another time.

At that point, you could tell me to use bookmarks. And it's what I do. Then 6 months later, I end up with 200 bookmarks I will not sort. And even if they were sorted, I will be too slow to find something in them with no tagging, I and I would use Google anyway.

In a ideal world, It would be easy to save and tag external resources (one click from the browser), and then, browse and find them back easily.

Do you have this feeling too, or it's just me? If so, what do you use for this?

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#2

Post by msadowski »

This is actually the reason why I stated a newsletter (weeklyrobotics.com). I was finding things on the Internet that were interesting, but then I could never find them again. I discovered that limiting search to my own domain made it much easier.

I’m using raindrop.io to save all the bookmarks in one place, and then while working on them I go through the top of the unsorted bookmarks, and select the ones I will feature in the newsletter.

This still doesn’t solve the problem of heaps of unsorted links (over 1.4k after around 3 years).

If I was to do something that you describe, I would probably look into dedicating some time into organizing your bookmarks, and if taking it to the next level then I would consider using TriliumNotes for making notes and categorizing the knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#3

Post by bluewalt »

msadowski wrote: post #2

This is actually the reason why I stated a newsletter (weeklyrobotics.com). I was finding things on the Internet that were interesting, but then I could never find them again. I discovered that limiting search to my own domain made it much easier. I’m using raindrop.io to save all the bookmarks in one place, and then while working on them I go through the top of the unsorted bookmarks, and select the ones I will feat…

Thanks! I took a quick look to Raindrop.io, it seems powerful and full of features. At this point I'm wondering why they did not solve the problem of unsorted links. Since there is a browser extension, a simple solution would be to allow user to add optional tags when the user bookmarks the link.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#4

Post by pamoroso »

I use the Google Keep browser extension.

When I click on the extension's icon (or right-click > Save to Keep), a draft note pops up with the page link in the body of the note, as well as any text selected on the page prior to clicking the icon.

From there I can add more text to the body, insert a title, and add or select a tag. Once the note is in Keep more features are available, such as attaching an image or archiving the note to move it out of the way. And the note is accessible and searchable from any device.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#5

Post by msadowski »

bluewalt wrote: post #3
msadowski wrote: post #2

This is actually the reason why I stated a newsletter (weeklyrobotics.com). I was finding things on the Internet that were interesting, but then I could never find them again. I discovered that limiting search to my own domain made it much easier. I’m using raindrop.io to save all the bookmarks in one place, and then while working on them I go through the top of the unsorted bookmarks, and select the ones I will feat…

Thanks! I took a quick look to Raindrop.io, it seems powerful and full of features. At this point I'm wondering why they did not solve the problem of unsorted links. Since there is a browser extension, a simple solution would be to allow user to add optional tags when the user bookmarks the link.

When you add a link to raindrop.io you can add it to any of your folders. Tags are yet another thing they support but I don’t use them extensively.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#6

Post by CrypticShift »

One solution is to continuously record web history and then just search it. The advantage is:

1. you often don't know what resources you will really "value" in the future, so no more "to save or not to save, this is the question"

2. tagging, to be effective, requires discipline (thinking about then sticking to an agile system). So, we just replace it with search, preferably NLP/AI (so you don't have to remember the exact keywords)

Apps do exist, from the expensive [1] to the experimental [2].

[1] https://heyday.xyz/

[2] https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#7

Post by alexpetralia »

I use a system of personal knowledge management (PKM), which I've posted about before:

1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget.

2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes the note is "read this article" or "catch up on all newsletters", so understanding a single note can take over an hour. On some tough weekends the process takes an entire day, but that is invariably a day where I feel like I learned a ton. Once the note is cleaned up (transcribed), I feel like I understand it. At this point I rarely forget it - it has been absorbed into my brain. The final step here is "categorizing" the note. I classify it using OneNote with tabs like "Clinical psychology" (nested under "Psychology") or "Investment management" (nested under "Finance") or "Math" or "Physics". This way, in the future, I don't have a million notes scattered around, but one clear place I know where to look. On average, this process takes 2-4 hours per weekend. I never accumulate bookmarks, Google Keep notes or unread emails more than a week to prevent existential dread.

3. Revisit: generally, people recommend you revisit your notes from time to time. I almost never do this. But if I ever am thinking about "Marketing" or "Sociology", I have an immense, high SNR repository of everything I've ever found valuable on the topic. I've done this for software interviews and it's been incredibly helpful.

Overall, I attribute this system to making me much smarter. It has been an invaluable investment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25302365

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#8

Post by Springtime »

I save everything I consider useful as an MHTML file (HTML/CSS/images in one file), which is native to Chromium browsers. This has the benefit of the page not being split into separate files as the normal save page does, doesn't break when the file is renamed like the normal save page does (on Windows at least), removes the need for bookmarks which go dead over time, preserves the original source URL in the file for later reference.

There are over 10k of such files I've saved in this manner. With practice it becomes second nature to categorize and tag them just using the filename, which makes them findable within seconds.

These have become like my own private search engine, without the issue of not being able to find answers to queries you know exist (which increasingly has become an issue with online search engines).

In Chromium the saving to MHTML feature is enabled by launching the browser with the CLI argument `--save-page-as-mhtml` (Vivaldi browser enables this by default without any arguments needed). Firefox used to support it via excellent addons up until their Quantum update but they haven't supported it since and is a dealbreaker to my daily use of it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#9

Post by dewey »

I used to think like that, stored everything in Pinboard, tagged properly. I also used to use nvalt (https://brettterpstra.com/projects/nvalt/) for that as it had good search and I didn't have to switch to other tabs to search Pinboard.

It felt good to "catalog" all this knowledge but in reality I never went back to it, just like bookmarks and I realized that if something is important enough I'll always be able to re-find or re-download almost everything I ever found.

Not feeling like you have to catalog and store everything in personal knowledge management apps is very liberating.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#10

Post by ebiester »

alexpetralia wrote: post #7

I use a system of personal knowledge management (PKM), which I've posted about before: 1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget. 2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes…

For those interested in PKM, that's also how I manage mine but I follow something closer to Tiago Forte's "Building a second brain" method.

I use Logseq, and I have a sandbox for the particular day. Using Tagging, I can have a #inbox #interest - or any sort of sorting, and then create queries for pages where I process that reading when it's tied to a project. A lot of them never end up being read, and as they go further down the list, they become less important to me.

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