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Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

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91–100 of 272 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#91
I used to bookmark pages frequently. I think at one point a few years ago I had more than 15,000 bookmarks in Firefox possibly dating back to 2001 or so (when I used IE!). (Edit: According to a file I have, I had 12,072 bookmarks on Aug. 1, 2015. As I recall this wasn't my peak.)

In practice, I found that by the time I would return to them (often years later), I frequently lost the context and the page went offline. So now I will typically instead paste the URL into an organized series of text file notes on various subjects, sometimes including a short summary of what interested me, a quote, or both. Even if I don't add a short note, I find that the categorization is more specific in the text file than the bookmarks, which helps contextualize the webpage. I'll also often either save the page to my hard drive or save it in Zotero, choosing the latter if I think I might cite it in a paper in the future.

I haven't stopped using bookmarks, but the bookmarks I have now are more ephemeral. I still sometimes fall into my old habits and use some bookmark folders for non-ephemeral things, but I've been getting better about this over the years. If it's in my bookmarks, it's probably not as important as what's in my text files.

A few years back, I did make a concerted effort to transfer as many of my bookmarks to text files as possible as well. I probably deleted over half of them in this process.

According to grep, I have approximately 43,957 URLs saved in my text files...

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#92

At what point do bookmarks essentially become an internet of your own making? I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection, or maybe a Yahoo style directory to browse them. Or... Stop collecting the internet and give your brain a break from data overload. There is a certain flavour of FOMO that keeps tabs open forever and bookmark lists getting huge. Let go of it all. There wi…

Surfing the web is a journey. In the same sense that we store our photos on the cloud and don't want to lose them because they remind us of experiences. The web is no different, we keep exploring and take some souvenirs along the way. Why does everything have to be useful and optimal always? I wouldn't want to rely on Google to keep some nice memories and recall stuff I found useful.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#94
I created a basic Ruby script to bookmark, tag, and search from the command line. I drag links in from the browser to the terminal to use it. It uses a single flat text file in a Dropbox folder so it works across all of my machines too. If you're a developer and you live at the terminal, I recommend a similar approach as it's just so simple.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#95

I have the same problem and have started using https://raindrop.io Hope it serves you well

I tried Raindrop.io and was impressed enough to get an annual subscription to it.

My main use case was to have a single place for all my bookmarks across Android, iOS, OS X and Linux, and across Firefox and Chrome.

Among all the solutions I evaluated, Raindrop.io had the best UX at the time.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#96

If you're willing to tag things so you can find them later, then https://pinboard.in If you're not then don't store them, just google them when you need them. That will either help you find the link you wanted, or it will find you something better, because the world has moved on since then.

Wholeheartedly agree with this. I've been very happy with pinboard, the one area that could use improvement is on the mobile side: it's a bit annoying to set a new bookmark in a mobile browser.

Simplepin on iOS.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#99
I put them in Evernote together with other notes and papers and stuff, and it's searchable there.

For dynamic content I save a bookmark, but for various articles and posts I can save the whole readable content which is nice, because otherwise if I want to follow up a five year old bookmark there's a good chance that it's gone now.

Re: Ask HN: How do you manage your bookmarks?

#100
post #72

At what point do bookmarks essentially become an internet of your own making? I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection, or maybe a Yahoo style directory to browse them. Or... Stop collecting the internet and give your brain a break from data overload. There is a certain flavour of FOMO that keeps tabs open forever and bookmark lists getting huge. Let go of it all. There wi…

Except with google it’s becoming impossible to find links from several years ago. Unless I remember exactly the right keywords and maybe the website name... How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is vi…

Google (and related services, such as youtube) allows you to use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to only show results that were created before or after a certain date.
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