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Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

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Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#31

Bookmarks are something I have grown tired of. From the days of del.icio.us, I started collecting bookmarks and it kind of trickled along almost until Pinboard went on life support (or something else if you'd prefer to call that). The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to. I can remember once or twice and either I couldn't find anything among my bookmar…

Bookmarks are useful for address bar autocomplete back to a site I know I visit semi-regularly, but for whatever reason disappeared out of my browser's autocomplete history. E.g. this might happen for social media sites that I only ever visit inside an incognito tab to try (probably in vain) to mitigate being tracked across visits. But also it can happen when I try a new browser or my phone resets itself or whatever. Then I just export the bookmarks.html from my laptop and import it on whatever other device.

I never bothered to look at the schema of the bookmarks.html, because feels like it's worked the same for 20+ years. I used to care a lot about housekeeping the structure, but it doesn't really matter, as long as they're in the bucket the browser will use them for autocomplete suggestions, so...

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#33
post #8

Mozilla-based browsers used to (before Firefox 3, I believe) store bookmarks as HTML (bookmarks.html) instead of using an SQLite database. It still uses a single HTML file when exporting or importing bookmarks.

Chrome can also import/export in this format, chrome://bookmarks, dots menu at the top right, export bookmarks.

The file it generates has:

    

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#34
I've been doing exactly this for ten years, keeping the bookmarks file in Git. I added 70 bookmarks today, which is more than average. But rather than just a "title" I have whatever seems like I might want to search for later, including if the link rots. So it's more of a summmary. With hashtags. In Markdown (though without newlines).

Each new day gets a header.

Here's Sunday, with blank lines added to get reasonable formatting on HN:

links from 02025-08-24:

https://archive.org/details/TheDesignOfSwitchingCircuits/pag... My childhood book on digital logic (including a little #electronics) as an #ebook. #hardware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_discharge_lamp sodium-arc and mercury-arc lamps are also HID lamps. #hardware

https://archive.org/details/ge-glow-lamp-manual-1966/page/n1... scan of GE’s glow-lamp manual for neon lamps from 01966. #ebook #hardware #electronics #history

https://youtu.be/Nn5v59l2Xec?t=64 VEMAG brand double-screw extruder screw pump #mechanisms pumping M&Ms and ground meat. #video footage of the parts being washed.

https://www.radiomuseum.org/r/aleksandro_arz_51_arz51.html very pretty old radio

https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat2141 "Superlenses" to overcome the diffraction limit, #optics #paper from 02008

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_length#Electrical_l... electrically long and short #antennas and loading coils and whatnot. #electronics #communications #radio

https://www.ornl.gov/publication/evaluation-power-fluidic-pu... #fluidics for pumping in #molten-salt #nuclear-reactors (just an abstract)

https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/in-defense-of-tech-trees trying to use "tech trees" to understand the #history of technological development

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction near-field #diffraction is "Fresnel diffraction" #optics

https://psi329.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Lewis-PernFascis... Was #Perón a fascist? #fascism #history #PDF #paper #toread

https://lwn.net/Articles/1030818/ #Treacherous-Computing for “confidential VMs” #privacy despite #Linux #virtualization #toread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44950482 discussion of alternative ways to run graphical apps inside #Docker, including maybe drawing in a web browser

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991638 my post about how #Rust’s approach to handling #Unicode introduces unnecessary bugs into command-line programs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApL1EL2GMk #Frondizi speaks about #Perón. #history #Argentina #video

https://github.com/3b1b/manim Manim math #animation software for morphing equations and plots and stuff into each other, using FFmpeg, OpenGL, LaTeX, and Pango

https://nvmexpress.org/wp-content/uploads/September-2020_NVM... in ZNS #zoned-storage a zone must be a power-of-2 number of LBAs, unlike in ZAC and ZBC #PDF #toread

https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/f2fs.html "f2fs" is the #Flash friendly #filesystem for #zoned-storage. “F2FS is a file system exploiting NAND flash memory-based storage devices, which is based on Log-structured File System (#LFS). The design has been focused on addressing the fundamental issues in LFS, which are snowball effect of wandering tree and high cleaning overhead.”

———⁂———

Here's today, ten years ago, so you can see how my bookmarking style has developed:

links from 2015-08-28:

http://www.excamera.com/sphinx/article-j1a-swapforth.html A free-software #Forth operating system running on the J1a open-source CPU running on a Lattice #FPGA thanks to Project #IceStorm’s reverse engineering and the resulting free-software #synthesis and programming toolchain, running on the Lattice iCEstick evaluation board with 8K of RAM. #J1 #hardware

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRVaLUQUmA8&list=PLACB124F79... A 2009 #video lecture series on #mecheng manufacturing processes by “nptelhrd”, Prof. Inderdeep Singh at IIT Roorkee. Some problems with the audio, seems to be a bit clipped. However, the video is entirely a talking head and a bunch of PowerPoint slides, so the only way you would watch this video to learn about powder metallurgy instead of reading a book is if you are dyslexic or have a beard fetish. At least it doesn’t have shitty elevator music.

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/ The USGS gives #pricing information on a variety of mineral #materials, including some historical stuff. #minerals

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/titanium/mc... #Titanium #pricing in the US has gone from US$9.62/kg in 2010 to US$11.20/kg in 2014. Nearby pages use dollars per pound, but the prices per kg show a sharp reduction from its peak of US$17.28 in 2005, but it had a low of US$6.50 in 2003, US$9.70 in 1995, and US$8.26 in 1992–3. This means that the FFC Cambridge Process is not in production yet.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2012/5188/ A #PDF with a bunch of metal #materials #pricing for 1970–2010. Comprehensive, covers nearly all metals and some semimetals. Unfortunately at least some prices use folk units like pounds instead of SI.

http://rebeccasolnit.net/essay/a-rape-a-minute-a-thousand-co... Rebecca Solnit talks a bit about #rape and #intimate-partner-violence. #feminism

https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2015/08/06/2015-184... The FCC is proposing to outlaw #free-software for wireless firmware.

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/4732/emulate-an... Programmers competing to do Intel 8086 (subset) #emulation in different languages, including a C program in 348 lines.

———⁂———

Perhaps surprisingly, of those 8 links from ten years ago, only one has really linkrotted; unsurprisingly it's Solnit's essay. But it survives in the Archive. The titanum PDF redirects to the general titanium Mineral Commodities Summary page.

Emacs full-text search is surprisingly often effective at finding relevant information. Grep (or M-x occur, its moral equivalent) works even more often. F6 opens the URL in my browser. Emacs C-s can search those 12000 bookmarks faster than I can type.

At some point in the past I wrote a Chrome extension that would show me all the links for a given hashtag with their descriptions (formatted as Markdown), with the hashtags being links to other similar hashtag pages, and also let me bookmark pages from within the browser interface, but I don't know where it is now. It wouldn't work with Manifest v3 anyway.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#35

I do this, albeit, kinda a Start Page. I like it because it is plain-text, and I can access it from any browser (not just the ones I bookmarked with). Mine is online (rendered client-side) so I can access it from anywhere. https://start.oinam.com Just in case, anyone wants to look the source is at https://github.com/oinam/start

Thank you for that "Void" tool. Very pleasant.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#36
post #5

I’m using a similar format to keep my links organized on an iPhone. A bookmarks.txt note kept in Apple Notes with markdown # headings to separate each category, allowing me to not keep open 500 tabs on Safari.

Let me check... 1331 open tabs in Safari on my iPad. Several text files with thousands of bookmarks, with various attempts at grouping. Since I cannot save myself, I save them.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#37
I think that is a good idea to keep URLs as text. I use the Tab Session Manager extension which allows me to export saved sessions (title, URL, with a little bit of extra stuff) as text (json actually, a little bit too verbose) and I also use Eagle Filer to save entire web pages, just in case it disappears from the web, which happens quite regularly. What I want is the title of the web page associated with its URL and maybe extra keywords. I don't use classic browser bookmarks much anymore.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#38

I have become somewhat disillusioned with maintaining a list of bookmarks, as I often discover that the URLs are no longer functional when revisiting pages that have been bookmarked for an extended period.

Use archive.org for permalinks?

Archive.org is always at risk of being shut down.

Re: Bookmarks.txt is a concept of keeping URLs in plain text files

#40

Bookmarks are something I have grown tired of. From the days of del.icio.us, I started collecting bookmarks and it kind of trickled along almost until Pinboard went on life support (or something else if you'd prefer to call that). The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to. I can remember once or twice and either I couldn't find anything among my bookmar…

having bookmark you don't use is one thing, but linkrot of that one bookmark you actually do need is much worse
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