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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?

#121

Post by hashhar »

Absolutely yes. It serves two primary purposes for me:

1. Archival. If I like something and will need to refer to it/revisit it later (more than a month, say) I will bookmark it.

2. Frequently used pages sit neatly on my bookmarks bar so that I can get to the websites I want quickly just by glancing at their favicons.

Organisation:

I primarily organize in 3 levels.

Top level: This is where frequently used stuff goes. I have configured FF to only show favicons for these so they take little space. eg. HN, GitHub, Outlook, Reddit and Bugzilla.

Second level: This is where things go for archival. I have bookmark folders at the top level that represent a category. eg. Books, Movies, Tech, Coding. Each of those can be further categorised. An example is my Tech folder is broken up into Articles, Blogs, Podcasts, Material (projects, GH repos etc.).

The void: This is the final level or organisation and is just a catch-all folder called Sort-These-Out where all stuff I'm too lazy to organise (or which isn't well defined right now, or things I'll get back on another machine maybe (Linux vs Windows)) goes. It currently has 13 bookmarks. Not bad.

PS: Did you know you can send tabs across Firefox instances on different machines by right clicking and hitting "Send Tab to Device"? The best thing ever.

EDIT: Forgot these two features.

1. Keyword search. Kind of like the bang query syntax from DuckDuckGo you can set up a keyword to search a single website by creating a bookmark. So I can go 'gh mycoolrepo' for searching on GitHub.

2. Tags. Firefox allows you to tag bookmarks. It helps me a lot when, for example, I want to find all bookmarks related to vim (but don't necessarily have vim in the page title). I'm working on an autotagger that integrates into Firefox to save me from having to tag them myself.

[1]: http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Firefox-Keywords (See method 2 for easier variant.

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

#122

Post by lucb1e »

I do occasionally, though usually Firefox' "awesomebar" will get me there anyway so there is not often a need.

My girlfriend does make extensive use of it for all sorts of things.

I think my mom uses it as well. My brother and dad I'm not sure about. Not sure what that says for a confidence interval, but many people still do. Then again, I'm sure there must be clusters of people (when clustering by who knows who) that never learned it's there, or who choose not to use it.

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

#123

Post by steverandy »

I use a browser called Colibri (https://colibri.opqr.co/).

It has something called Links, where all URLs that you added are sorted by date. You can save a URL quickly with keyboard shortcut (CMD+D).

I also organize the links that I frequently visit by topics in the Lists section.

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

#124

Post by th3reverend »

i bookmark for:

1. work; internal websites can't be found on google and i can never remember them. 2. to clean up open tabs related to a task that i have to postpone; i bookmark them en masse and come back to them later; discard when done. 3. i have a dozen or so websites i visit daily; right click the folder of bookmarks and open them all at once.

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

#127

Post by j_s »

jcrites wrote: post #57

I don't use browser bookmarks but I do use bookmarks through pinboard.in: https://pinboard.in/u:jcrites With a paid feature called an archival account, Pinboard stores an actual copy of each bookmarked article, kind of like your own private Wayback Machine. It provides full text search over these articles. I frequently save articles that I read so that I can refer to them later. It doesn't happen often, but once in a…

Is there any browser add-on that will display the public Pinboard tags for HN stories? I guess a pointer to how to get this via whatever API would be helpful too.

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

#128

Post by AceyMan »

I treat URLs like any other document: I click+drag the favicon off the address bar and drop it in the target folder in explorer (file browser in Windows), which creates a dot-url shortcut.

Why keep resources in a unique silo? You wouldn't keep all your PDFs/Word/rtf/&c in a " manager app", so why do URLs have to be kept in one?

Also, this way they all get backed up since I keep all work docs on my network drive.

I'm surprised no one else follows this pattern, but I've never seen anyone else use it, nor have I won over any converts via its sheer awesome factor .

FYI, works in FF and Chrome, but not Opera. (Bummer, because I like Opera generally, and it's my default Android browser.)

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

#129

Post by hashhar »

hueller wrote: post #59

I use pinboard. As far as native bookmarks, I don't like that browsers have kind of black boxed their bookmarks and require individual proprietary cloud sync for these things (I realize Firefox has a self hosted option, but it's kind of outdated and last I checked the documentation was spotty. Even then it's only FF). I know there's also the Netscape Bookmark Format which is kind of sketch, but at least it's somethin…

Do you have any opinions on what an open bookmark format should cover? I'd like to hear those. Could be a good and relatively simple project I could mentor on.

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

#130

Post by nickpsecurity »

maneesh wrote: post #92
copperx wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by web archive? I recursively download sites using curl/wget on websites I want to preserve for a long time. Is web archive something different?

The Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org It's been backing up the internet for over a decade

Oh, the one on Shark Tank:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in4mAqHn_d4

What a treat. Too bad the longer one where you explain it got taken down. Anyway, although highly skeptical about the product, I'll at least give you props for turning down the final offer on grounds of who offered it. Most wouldn't. I'd never do a deal with him if it was about public benefit. Plus, seeing all of them loose their shit (esp Cuban's faces) was hilarious. Thanks for the entertainment. :)

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