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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

#61

Post by lurk2 »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

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…

The chief use case is saving the titles of YouTube videos so that you can reconstruct a playlist when the videos are removed.

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

#62

Post by aa-jv »

yegle wrote: post #43

My way of managing bookmarks is to just print the page as a PDF, save PDF in a Google Drive folder. Then you can do full text search quickly.

Same, been doing this since the start of the web. I have decades of web pages I've found interesting over the years, and its all offline/local searchable and will be there for me when the grid goes down.

I'm part-way through getting the 90,000+ PDF files collected in this manner, analyzed by an LLM so I can .. query it about my own interests, I guess? ;)

I don't find that saving URL's is very productive - they are the dangling pointer of the web. Far better to have your own cache of docs to refer to imho ..

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

#63

Post by adithyassekhar »

teiferer wrote: post #29
adastra22 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t have bookmark sync in your browser?

Is there a reliable standard to do this across browser vendors and versions and not have to rely on a proprietary cloud implementation on somebody's server?

I think bookmarks.html is pretty standard.

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

#64

Post by jp1016 »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

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…

Totally agree with you I have had the same experience. Most of the bookmarks I saved over the years, I never went back to. These days I usually just copy content, run a quick summary through ChatGPT, and if its useful I keep it as a note. That way I dont have to keep deferring things in an endless bookmark pile.

Now I mostly keep two kinds of bookmarks: quick-access ones for work (like repos I contribute to or PR sections I need to check often), and then more organized notes for ideas, projects, or interests I want to revisit later. To make that easier, I use a little tool I put together (beavergrow.com) where I can group bookmarks into blocks and keep notes alongside them—it’s been handy for giving some structure without overcomplicating things.

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

#65

Post by fransje26 »

Pooge wrote: post #46
sdovan1 wrote: post #19

I never really used browser bookmarks until I discovered Firefox's bookmark keyword feature [1]. It basically eliminates the search step. For example, I set "pr" to the GitHub pull request page. Just press Alt + D to focus the address bar, type the keyword, and hit Enter. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how...

I don't know why nobody uses that feature. I have quite a few. For example, Wikipedia (w), Wiktionary (wt), Go docs (go), ... Saves me a middleman request.

> Saves me a middleman request.

Saving the earth one request (less) at a time!

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

#66

Post by account42 »

I think this is going in the wrong direction. While cool URIs don't change [0], many URLs that you'd like to bookmark are not cool. So for bookmarks to be useful long-term you need to store much more data than just the URL. At the very least you need a timestamp to be able to find the resource you wanted to bookmark on the Internet Archive in the future. But better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside the bookmark instead. It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that or other relatively simple usability enhancements instead of blindly copying Chrome's UI (which usually means removing features).

[0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

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

#67

Post by motorest »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

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…

> The thing is - I just saved bookmarks, I never really utilised them ever, to find something, to go back to.

You're not describing a bookmarks issue. You're describing a personal organization issue, which is reflected on how you manage bookmarks.

You're voicing the exact same sort of complains often directed at todo lists. In fact, from your description you're implicitly treating bookmarks as ad-hoc Todo lists, and you're complaining your To-do backlog is growing.

Like others, you can blame bookmarks and Todo lists for your growing backlog of things you want to do but never get around to doing. Those are not the problem though, and only reflect a symptom caused by the actual problem.

> So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things".

You're describing a symptom of your problem. The fact that it extends beyond bookmarks is a telltale sign.

> This is not at all reflecting on why or why not one should do such "things", I absolutely believe this is good and sometimes in fact results in tools/services massively good, I am just talking about this out loud wondering whether it's just me or this kind of fatigue really sets in for other people as well.

I believe you're expressing the same issues expressed by those who have trouble managing their task queue. Your problem reflects on bookmarks, on personal notes, on productivity software, etc. This means your problem is not bookmarks, or personal notes, or productivity software. It's something else that is reflected across tools and systems.

I have a huge bookmark collection, but I don't care if I saved a bookmark that I never opened. I configured my browsers to exclusively use bookmarks in recommendations, thus serving as an ad-hoc search engine of noteworthy links I visited or want to visit. If I don't visit any of the links, that's too bad. Why would it present a problem?

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

#68

Post by deafpolygon »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #9

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…

I bookmark things so I can look them up when I search in the addressbar. If it’s bookmarked, the result is higher than my search engine results— making them quicker to find again.

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

#70

Post by j45 »

account42 wrote: post #66

I think this is going in the wrong direction. While cool URIs don't change [0], many URLs that you'd like to bookmark are not cool. So for bookmarks to be useful long-term you need to store much more data than just the URL. At the very least you need a timestamp to be able to find the resource you wanted to bookmark on the Internet Archive in the future. But better would be to save a snapshot of the site alongside th…

I agree, annotating bookmarks is quite valuable, including highlights, which could also be stored in text.

Logseq, etc, are tools that help facilitate this, albeit in not plain text format, but close.

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