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WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

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Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#81

Post by valbaca »

I've been using Pocket for free since 2011: getpocket.com It's not great or perfect but it's good enough for "to read later" and keeping a running "grimoire"

I've tried other methods: chrome bookmarks, evernote, plain-text, etc but nothing provides:

1. Ubiquity with just one login

With Pocket, everywhere I browse I can add to pocket, including at work. I don't want to ever use my Google login at work b/c I don't want my work Chrome bookmarks (which are basically work-internal websites) to conflict with my personal ones.

Pocket is available on my phone, iPad, browser, and work browser quickly and easily.

2. Has tags.

I stick with about one tag per item. I don't need it to be fully tagged out, but just a general one. Typically by programming language or topic.

One special tag is "someday" which is how I get very long items (like online books) out of my short "To Read" queue.

3. exports

I haven't needed it but it's nice to know that I can easily export my bookmarks, with tags, to html. From there I can convert to something else if I want.

I've tried GTD and other "universal" systems and my current system is a bit of a mess (mostly because of the work-life dichotomy), but at least my "save to read later" flow is simple:

1. Go to hacker news 2. send to pocket 3. when I've got time, scroll through my to-read and pick one that packs into the amount of time I have

It does one thing and does it well enough for me.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#82

Post by nojito »

danielecook wrote: post #21
fit2rule wrote: post #18

This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…

What sorts of web pages do you do this for? What if the pdf version is difficult to read?

Most if not all web browsers have a reader mode which trims away nonsense.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#83

Post by pedalpete »

What do you guys think of their pricing? It appears more of a "here are some features you probably don't need, but if you want to give us a few bucks..."

Curious if anyone has had success with this type of pricing model. We've tried it on my current app, and get a few bucks a day, but it doesn't compare to our B2B business.

Thinking of something similar in a new app we're building.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#84

Post by rakoo »

fit2rule wrote: post #41
ramraj07 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazingly simple, but what about in mobile? There's pdf printing here too but it's not as simple as command P! Any ideas?

If I need to save a page I've read on mobile, I mail myself the link to my desktop and print it there, where the PDF Archive lives. Its muscle memory at this point. Still, would be nice if the Browser vendors would cotton on to how powerful this is, and make the whole thing a bit more seamless for the mobile/desktop bridge, or just make Print-to-PDF work more smoothly for this case on mobile. Either way, I also have…

The advantage of doing it on the desktop is that you get to print the desktop version of the site.

There probably is an avenue to automate printing from your desktop as soon as it receives the email; who knows, maybe even

The inconvenient of your way is that your bookmarks are only available on the Desktop, from your mobile all you can have is the list of URLs you sent yourself. It's still probably better than having some service running all the time you want to query though.

Your system is surprisingly "low-tech" and sounds extremely interesting, I'm tempted to start doing it as well. Do you have any kind of organization or viewer for your stack of PDFs, or are they just files amassed on your hard drive ?

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#85

Post by rob-olmos »

Not sure if Memex has this, but one feature I like with Toby is that I can a save window as a "session" and it makes a "collection" of all the tabs. Works well since I do window-per-topic that I'll come back to later.

I believe Toby lacks text search for the page's contents, so it's mainly just easier/better organization for bookmarks, and would be nice if the data wasn't only tied to their cloud, or if I could make an easy backup.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#86

Post by kirubakaran »

rob-olmos wrote: post #85

Not sure if Memex has this, but one feature I like with Toby is that I can a save window as a "session" and it makes a "collection" of all the tabs. Works well since I do window-per-topic that I'll come back to later. I believe Toby lacks text search for the page's contents, so it's mainly just easier/better organization for bookmarks, and would be nice if the data wasn't only tied to their cloud, or if I could make…

What do you think of this? : https://histre.com/blog/save-restore-tabs/ [1]

You can save all the tabs into a Histre notebook.

The advantages are:

1. It's a web app, so a window of tabs can be saved in Chrome and restored in Firefox, for example.

2. Searchable

3. Can be shared with your teams

[1] Disclaimer: I'm the founder

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#87

Post by rakoo »

donmcronald wrote: post #42
fudged71 wrote: post #2

I'm excited for this resurgence of archiving, searching, highlighting, bookmarking, note-taking, etc

I want a self-hosted version of something like this. I currently use historio.us, which is one of the only services I pay for, but I'd much rather have a good self hosted option. I've been looking for years.

Maybe Archivebox (https://archivebox.io/) can suit your needs ? Archiving is what it does, but there's nothing built-in for searching

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#88

Post by anonymoushn »

ben509 wrote: post #66
fit2rule wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ pdftotext | grep sometext ^^ first advantage Also: a) Formatting is not lost, it just changes to fit the default paper size I've got selected (A4) but doesn't really make much difference, since its a snapshot, and b) URL is right there in the Header of the PDF, and is clickable, so no - not really an issue. This archive also functions as a bookmark collection as well as an offline copy for future reference .. (Disc…

Grep is not much of an advantage when Mac, Windows and Linux all have as-you-type full-text search of common formats like HTML and PDF.

Can you point me to the as-you-type full-text search on Mac for a directory transitively containing 20,000 pdfs?

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#89

Post by filoleg »

fit2rule wrote: post #58
filoleg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be careful with using this method and check the generated PDF versions with your eyes before writing them off as "all is good, it is archived now". I recently got bitten by that, when I was trying to print out some page in Chrome, and it was rendering as a bunch of white space surrounded by some elements from the page, but without any actual content I cared about. Turns out, my situation isn't that uncommon f…

I've since learned in this thread that Chrome and Firefox are not as good as Safari for this technique - it hasn't impacted me much since I only use Chrome/Firefox for development, mostly. And although I do occasionally check the produced PDF's, the layout doesn't matter to me at all since I use a cmd-line grep or combination of 'pdftotext' to find the page, open the PDF, and click the link to go to the original web…

That clarifies it a lot, thanks for explaining.

I actually remember having to eventually go through Safari to print out that one page I mentioned above that was giving me issues in Chrome, so that makes a lot of sense. Glad to find out it wasn't just me somehow being lucky with Safari, and that it is actually a known thing.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#90

Post by ORioN63 »

flower-giraffe wrote: post #68

This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN. How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere? How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory? I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades. I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxo…

I've been fighting my ~3000 (~70% untagged) bookmarks for a while.

Right now, I've gave up on silly tags like "Postgres" or "Python". Currently, I'm trying to adapt the bookmark concept into different uses cases. The main one is sessions, but I have a few others niche ones, like "read later" and "a tool a day".

Honestly, my takeaway from managing my bookmarks, is that, snapshotting a session, is the closest thing I have to a "hot" start. I instantly recognize what I was working on and I remember why I opened/kept open those tabs.

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