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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?

#161

I have thousands of bookmarks, and gave up putting them in to folders years ago. Now I just tag them with every relevant keyword that I can think of when I make the bookmark, and search them that way. Firefox's bookmark manager is very primitive, though, and I've long been meaning to migrate my bookmarks over to org-mode in emacs, where I have much more powerful searching, metadata, editing, linking, commenting, rest…

What would you like to seem improved in the bookmark manager? I'm currently working on the ability to rename the bookmarks inline in the tree instead of the input boxes on bottom in the Bookmark Manager (the one you get from Ctrl+Shift+B or Ctrl+Shift+O).

Searching tags, bookmarks, and bookmark comments by regular expressions would be awesome.

It would be nice if I could, say, rename a tag. So, for example, if I had a tag named "map", I'd like to be able to rename it to "maps" and have all bookmarks with that tag updated. Same with deleting a tag from all the bookmarks that have it.

I'd like to be able to:

- see a list of all my tags, in various sort orders, and be able to navigate through them like folders (expanding and collapsing their contents).

- perform operations on the bookmarks with a certain tag. For instance, to be able to take a certain subset of them and move them to another tag, again much like what was possible with folders.

- make comments on tags that include a full markup language (org-mode markup ideally, but some regular markup would be better than just vanilla ascii).

That's just off the top of my head. There have been other features which I've wished for over the years that Firefox's bookmark manager didn't have but I knew I could easily get with org-mode in emacs.

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

#162
post #88

I'm a little surprised that the majority of the answers here are Yes! I help my parents and my kids work with bookmarks but I have none myself; and I was beginning to think that bookmarks were primarily used by non-technical people. I guess I was wrong! Everything I need is a simple URL (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?) or a quick Google search away. If I come across a deep link that's so importa…

> (like, my bank: usaa.com - why would I bookmark that?)

So that you are certain you never accidentally typo the url and end up giving your banking credentials to an impostor... That's why I do it, anyway.

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

#163
I used to, I now use zotero to save whole pages onto webdav, from there bunch of scripts peel the ads off, scrape the text, convert to PDF, store in cms and index for full text search on solr. Also hooked up Dropbox to do the same for one click archiving from mobile. Since Dropbox and the webdav are shared between my partners and I, it's a convenient way to build knowledge base. Experimenting hooking up Telegram and slack as well to integrate everything for no hassle user-end. The real pain in the ass is passing the URL itself, consistently, without insisting users use another third party app.

*Forgot to mention the best part: Backend pools these full-text documents, cleans and parses for NLP, then generates meaningful tags, and organizes documents in an auto generated folder hierarchy which is based on word2vec/doc2vec and content clusters. Whole thing runs on a dedicated server with two 1070 GTX video cards for the NLP work which is training and re-evaluating constantly as new content pours in.

Altogether it was 2-3 years of work.

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

#164

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…

Here's part of that script you're talking about: wget --recursive --level=5 --convert-links --page-requisites --wait=1 --random-wait --timestamping --no-parent $1 Combine with something to parse out the Chrome bookmarks (it's XML, IIRC), and it wouldn't take too long to nail down.

Chrome has the option to export all bookmarks to an html file, which I think can be given as an input to wget.

Now if I understand that correctly, won't it recursively download every web page and all it's links 5 levels deep? Because that could be quite enormous if there are just a few web pages with lots of links...

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

#165
I use it, but not in its original way.

I would bookmark a link in Chrome just because it automatically shows up (in type ahead) when I search for similar keywords in the address bar. I have too many bookmarks to categorize and remember.

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

#166
post #45

I probably have 500 bookmarks. I never click on them though. Instead I (ab)use bookmarks as a way to increase the weight of URLs in chrome's navigation bar autocomplete/suggestion algorithm. e.g. If you find that you're going to a site's homepage and clicking three times, instead once you get to the actual page you want, bookmark it. You can even give it a more memorable name, like "standup hangout" and then watch it…

I do the same. Tangentially, I find Firefox's address bar autocomplete to be far superior to Chrome's (better partial/fuzzy matching and combination matches across URL and page titles). A bit ironic given one is the product of a search company.

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

#169
post #45

I probably have 500 bookmarks. I never click on them though. Instead I (ab)use bookmarks as a way to increase the weight of URLs in chrome's navigation bar autocomplete/suggestion algorithm. e.g. If you find that you're going to a site's homepage and clicking three times, instead once you get to the actual page you want, bookmark it. You can even give it a more memorable name, like "standup hangout" and then watch it…

I'm also doing the same thing. I add #hashtag to add keywords that are not on the title of the bookmark.
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