For my CTO newsletter I use raindrop.io to store interesting articles I encounter, export them to CSV (like bookmarks.txt), sort, filter and remove 90%, convert them to my own format, write my content and convert them to Markdown and then to HTML with Hugo.
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 bookmarks or the sites were long gone. I really don't think I personally had to consult my thousands of bookmarks (which I have now dutifully migrated to Raindrop of course, because why the hell not) in any useful sense ever. I paid for a couple of archiving services as well before realising "nah, I don't really need that, nor this recurring outgoing payment in my life".
So like a lot of things on the Internet, I guess I did "bookmarking things" just for the sake of doing "bookmarking things".
That reminds me of note-taking. There was a time when I used to do "note-taking exploration and research" and never really took any notes or, hell, even needed them. When I started note-taking, while I still keep an eye out for a decent app, I just pick a decent or half-decent note-taking app and I just take notes. Oh, backup and sync tools and services. Those too - there was "explore and research" and now there's "just use something damnit". "TODOing" to, yes! I am sure this tool (or philosophy? style? bookmarking architecture?) is very nice and novel.
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.
Reading the author's description made me realize how unbookmark-like bookmarks actually are. The current implementations are somewhat akin to creating a list of books that you like at the library. It's not so much a pointer to the information you found useful, as it is a list of books you found useful. You still have to do some digging when you go back for the book. If the book is lost, you end up having a reference to something that you cannot obtain. And if you just add books to the end of your list, you still end up having to search through the list. The only way around that is to spend time organizing your list. It's no wonder why bookmarks are useless to so many people.
The author doesn't really solve the problem with bookmarks, except for one. The last one. By sticking a bookmarks file in a project directory, at least you're only searching through a list of bookmarks relevant to the project. If you are no longer interested in the project and delete it, you're also getting rid of bookmarks that you (hopefully) no longer need. It also addresses the portability of bookmarks. As far as I can tell, the only way to move bookmarks between any of the major browsers involves the use of special software or network services. Look at moving bookmarks from one Firefox installation to another: you either use online sync, export to HTML to import from HTML, or import the database (which replaces your current bookmarks with the ones being imported).
And — possibly to also literally keep them inside the browser’s default bookmarks/favourites whatever browser one uses. Not on some fancy service with AI and what not.
Browsers have been doing an excellent job of managing bookmarks, you can tag and search for them from the address bar itself which is very convenient.
If you organise them you can even reference them from the codebase, or the documentation to avoid clutter. The format is simple and dumb enough so that a simple bookmark.txt can be converted into a dictionary, array that can be used in the program if some URLs are supposed to be used there.
It's not revolutionary by any means, but I have to confess that it didn't occur to me that's a great per repo documentation reference tool or per folder.
No link rot + it's available without internet.
I switched to saving pages using SinglePage instead, that saves the current page as a single stand-alone HTML file. It loses the bookmark-like features, but I can sort those saved files easier in my file system to keep them like any other downloaded documents on various topics. Each file also by default has a comment near the top with its original URL, so it would be easy to write a script to find all of those and build something like bookmarks.html.
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
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how...
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