Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 161 posts

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

#81

Post by habibur »

Did the same, with the following differences :

- tab separator instead of space. you don't need cut -d with tabs. tab is the default separator for cut.

- use xsel -b to capture clipboard data while adding. Copy the URL into from browser to clipboard. And then run on console

    $ url.add hn bookmark script  # all parameters are keyword tags.
The script fetches the URL from clipboard $(xsel -b)

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

#82

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

For me bookmarks are this "I know I saw this somewhere..." thing. Sometimes searching All of Internet for that one specific source isn't efficient.

Which means that spending 10 seconds tagging and categorising a link before saving it becomes really useful.

If I suspect even a little that the site or content might disappear (completely or behind a paywall) later, I use Obsidian's Web Clipper to save the whole text locally.

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

#83

Post by eadmund »

iamcalledrob wrote: post #80

The underappreciated .url file / [InternetShortcut] format seems like a much better fit for this: 1. 20+ years of OS support for double-click to open 2. It already supports an embedded title. 3. It's basically just INI/TOML, so you can add custom fields that get ignored by parsers. Want to embed a screenshot? Just append Screenshot=B64(data). Want to add tags? Same deal. You can also organise them as files in...folde…

> It's basically just INI/TOML

That’s a dealbreaker for me. I like something that I can use grep and other Unix utilities on. There’s a reason that the tabular style formats of /etc/passwd, crontab and inetd exist.

> You can also organise them as files in...folders.

+1 on this concept, though. For some reason folks forget that the filesystem is a pretty decent hierarchical database!

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

#85

Post by iamcalledrob »

eadmund wrote: post #83
iamcalledrob wrote: post #80

The underappreciated .url file / [InternetShortcut] format seems like a much better fit for this: 1. 20+ years of OS support for double-click to open 2. It already supports an embedded title. 3. It's basically just INI/TOML, so you can add custom fields that get ignored by parsers. Want to embed a screenshot? Just append Screenshot=B64(data). Want to add tags? Same deal. You can also organise them as files in...folde…

> It's basically just INI/TOML That’s a dealbreaker for me. I like something that I can use grep and other Unix utilities on. There’s a reason that the tabular style formats of /etc/passwd, crontab and inetd exist. > You can also organise them as files in...folders. +1 on this concept, though. For some reason folks forget that the filesystem is a pretty decent hierarchical database!

It's really just Key=Value, with [InternetShortcut] as the first line.

Should be pretty easy to grep through. It's an absolutely minimal format

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

#87

Post by chongli »

Does anyone have a solution for full-text search of a folder of bookmarks? Specifically I want to search the sites themselves, not merely the text of the home pages (which is where the URLs point).

The specific problem I’m trying to solve is searching for seeds. I have about 20 different seed vendors bookmarked I want to search across all of their seed catalogues at once (without having to visit each site to search one at a time).

More broadly though I would love the ability to do custom / curated search. A search engine designed for searching collections of sites instead of the entire internet would be ideal.

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

#88

Post by JulianWasTaken »

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…

> It's a shame that no browser cares to integrate that

I'm trying out using the Obsidian Web Clipper extension, which essentially does this (and using it for anything I'd previously have bookmarked).

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

#89

Post by account42 »

bmacho wrote: post #21
pmlnr wrote: post #14

Don't. Link rot is harsh. Something like wallabag saved so much content for me that is otherwise now lost.

Ctrl+s > ctrl+d. No link rot + it's available without internet.

Ideally, Ctrl+D would do both so you have a backup but also can check the current state for content that receives updates.

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

#90

Post by cluckindan »

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…

Even better would be snapshotting the page multiple times with exponential intervals, and providing a mechanism to diff any changes.

I hate it when (news) articles change without acknowledging the changes.

Edit: come to think of it, MediaWiki + a crawler bot would be near ideal for this.

Post reply on HN