The Betula bookmark manager and the Mycorrhiza wiki engine are among my favourite apps. They both use mycomarkup and are easy to self-host. Give them a spin.
Do you happen to know if it supports tabs in code blocks (renders tabs as tabs instead of spaces equivalent)? I failed to find a way to test without installing.
It does seem render TABs into TABs, yes. However, I don't think you can specify the TAB size. I looks like it's hardcoded to display as being 8 SPACEs wide.
The author, bouncepaw, is very friendly. If you need a TAB to look like it's, say 4 SPACEs wide, perhaps he will accept a feature request.
My main problem with bookmarks that I forget about them. I don't need a bookmark keeping service, I need one which would bring them forward when I look for something, based on context too. Something like which also makes a plain text searchable snapshot of the page? Maybe LLMs can solve that.
You're nearly there my friend: bookmarks should be centered around content and not around links.[1]
I've written a lot about this, and I got so annoyed with bookmarking and highlighting services getting it so frustratingly wrong[2] that I wrote my own solution from the ground up in 2020[3], and I have never looked back to Pinboard, Instapaper or Readwise.
It's honestly not that hard once you get the mental model and if you aren't interested in using a service you can easily build something that suits your own needs over a few weekends.
[1]: Links are definitely important metadata though!
I solve this by saving links in Org Roam with links to other notes for related topics. Then when I want to find things, I can look at the backlinks for some topic note.
There are lots of similar tools that also support this flow; basically anything that supports note backlinks (Obsidian, Joplin, Logseq, etc.). I don't ever really use browser bookmarks, because I never found myself actually doing anything but saving links (I never referred to them later). I actually find and navigate to links I save in my notes all the time though.
I built a tool, https://showboard.ca, that does most of what you're looking for.
It helps visualize and organize bookmarks into boards, which you can then share with others. It also scrapes the contents of the links, which is then searchable.
Same problem here. I have thousands of bookmarks and have no quick way to find out what I have. The bookmarks just get lost in the nested folders. I built a browser extension for myself to show all the bookmarks on one page, making it easy to access them and to search them. I called it One Page Favorites. Basically all my bookmarks/favorites on one page.
Edit: Also it’s the first time for me to try to do an extension for all three browsers at the same time, Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
I had the same problem for my bookmarks, but I (kinda) answered it using 2 ways:
Random link (when you don't know what to search but want to visit a (curated) cool link), and search (search in title, link, tags, description).
On the paper it works great, if only you can tags those links and write a comprehensive description using keywords you'll remember. But in real life, it's something like this: https://links.l3m.in/en/ and the search barely work (because no tags nor description is not helping).
Thanks! My main need is to recall all the relevant browsing information when needed. I have hundreds of tabs opened and thousands of bookmarks. Sometimes I vaguely remember visiting a site in the past but don't recall the exact website and it wasn't bookmarked. So I went full force with feature creep (why not) and put all the open tabs, bookmarks, and visit history on one page. Seeing the full list in front of me makes it easier to browse and search.
Edit: By request, here're the links to the extensions.
I do something similar with interactive fuzzy search (CLI), and the search experience is quite good for me, even with limited tagging. Links contain a lot a useful information...
Yeah, if the search is not about something too niche I can find results using the search feature of my share links instance.
Here's a recent example; I searched for "search engine", and found the article I wanted to share ("A look at search engines with their own indexes" by seirdy).
Tags are good. Does the browsers have a standard way to access them? I know Firefox has something. Not sure about Chrome/Edge/Safari. I know some people just annotate the title with tags during bookmarking, like [tag1 tag2]. Searching would definitely hit on those.
https://mymind.com/ is based on AI analysis of page content, or something like that. I've never been able to use their product because they require a Google or Apple account.
https://raindrop.io/ apparently also has full-text search for page contents as a paid feature. I'm on the free tier and haven't tried it either.
- -> I need to use a third-party service (Raindrop) for bookmarking.
- Common web searches in the Firefox address bar do not search my bookmarks at the same time, as they would normally. I need to directly use Raindrop to search specifically from my bookmarks.
- -> I might save useful things but forget about them entirely, and end up searching for them again.
How so? You can still set tags on bookmarks, and those tags get matched by text you type in the address bar to determine what bookmarks to show you.
> Common web searches in the Firefox address bar do not search my bookmarks at the same time, as they would normally.
Yeah, that's something I would love Firefox to add: a local search index for full-content search of every page in my bookmarks and history, based on my cache.
Oh, I'm sorry, I mixed it up. Firefox no longer supports bookmarks with descriptions, which I would also like to have. Firefox on desktop has tags, but the mobile version doesn't.
A friend is building service called memxi that scrapes thr page you bookmark and then gives u a rag like way to look up things later with LLM fuzzy search
Yeah, I feel like what I really want is something like this, but also it saves the whole page and indexes it and that's the first set of results when I type into my address bar. Ideally self-host-able. I kinda enjoy organizing my bookmarks at times, but I mostly do that so I can find things... which I remember from content, not my organization, so I know it's mostly pointless to organize (for me).
You can get some of that in various combinations, but I haven't seen all of it.
See my comment above, but maybe this tool, https://showboard.ca, that does most of what you're looking for.
Except the address bar auto-complete, that would be next level.
Certainly interesting. I had a similar project under works; I first looked at ActivityPub for federation but couldn't wrap my head around it. I settled on using some naive HTTP / REST for it, ie. just having one instance send queries to other linked instances when searching the whole network. The "federation" then would be kind of a whitelist model where each admin chooses their own outward peers / who to follow.
I didn't end up completing the project, though. I lost the code once due to an unfortunate home directory accident. I also worked both the front and backends at the same time, which slowed things down. Additionally, it was more of a hobby project where I was just learning the tech stack.
The end goal was sort of a small federation of independent indexes of good-quality webpages, which could function as a search tool for use cases such as finding different alternatives in a certain product category. Search results would be ranked based on how many linked instances save the links.
I might end up trying Betula, but it doesn't really seem to fulfill my ideal. I'm fine with Raindrop too, search works, and publishing my bookmarks is not a passion of mine.
More powerful organization tools compared to browsers, but most importantly, I can switch browser at no cost, use multiple of them without worrying about synchronization, and access them on other PCs.
I also thought it was useless until I tried it
Oh nice. I have a static html page I maintain on my website. the simplicity of maintaining that can't be beat, but it would be nice to give other people an easier way of following that if they'd like.
ironically i didn't went that route because it would be a pain to add content from both computers and mobile... turn out i now think maintaining a static html or md page on a remote server is less work than dealing with all the bs of thise things. including the bookmark Managers built into browsers which are all garbage to retrieve links
Firefox is actually decent for retrieving taged links, you just type * in the address field and it will only show you results from your bookmarks. It has become my second brain. I have written more about my use of the built-in bookmark manager in earlier comments if you are interested.
My only real gripe with Firefox is that the mobile client lacks the option to add tags. So frustrating!
it is crap and you know it. it barely search the title. not url. not description or tags. which they add and remove from the add bookmark dialog every blue moon. btw i don't know which weird version your using because the current one doesn't have tags even in the desktop. maybe you didn't notice last random change
I have used this method for years and it has not changed at all in that time period. I put all my bookmarks in one folder, no hierarchy, and add the tags that is on the top of my head, and move on. I save new bookmarks several times a day and retrieve them within seconds. For me, it is a perfect system and has not changed at all while I have used it. And believe me, I have tried a lot of bookmarking solutions the last 20 years, nothing has stuck like this basic habit has.
I'm have been using the latest version of FF for about 14 years, first 10 years on Arch Linux, and the last 4 years on Fedora (the Flatpak version).
Blockchain is useful in very limited circumstances. Namely, when:
1) The central party running the website accumulates value from its growing network but doesn’t want liability for their database being hacked and corrupted (eg having someone give themselves a lot of votes or internal credits), or prevent the fear that they won’t pay out (eg when PayPal froze accounts for the tiniest reasons, or Lebanese banks, or Canada, etc.). In the past this was partially solved with reuquiring middlemen to post surety bonds in every state and registering as a money transmitter. But many marketplaces (eg Etsy, Ebay, Kickstarter, Uber Eats) today operate in a gray area when they do payouts.
2) When a community (whether local or global) are engaging in some ongoing collective action and want to make sure everyone can verify the rules were followed, without relying on fallible middlemen. The Factory Pattern allows them to easily verify that the publicly audited software was indeed not tampered with. Examples include: contests, elections, roles and permissions, escrow transactions, memberships with recurring subscriptions, disbursements to approved entities etc. In the past we just had bank accounts be a block box for most investors etc.
Lately I've been more in favor of making notes with hyperlinks in markdown over bookmarks as I can search those better with vscode and will have more context to what those links are used for.
Betul (with umlaut) is a common Turkish name as well, from Arabic, of similar meaning. Also name of birch tree and related things, e.g. Fomitopsis betulina for birch fungus.
cool, but I don't see the point of it being federated. My bookmarks are just stuff I might want to see again, probably not very interesting to anyone else
so I can hardly see the benefit of them going off and propagating throughout the entire known universe
Sometimes you may find links you think others might be interested in but don't think they're so interesting that it's worth submitting to HN or posting on your social media. But maybe it's just not for you, and that's fine too.
It has ActivityPub support, which in some ways (at least for me) is even better -- this means that you can e.g. follow Betula accounts from Mastodon (or Bonfire, etc.) and see what they bookmark.
I have long been eager to leave Pinboard. This is the first viable alternative I've seen: written in reasonable languages, storage through Sqlite and not some burdensome db server, self-hostable without any docker BS. Very promising!
- https://grimoire.pro/
- https://bookmarkos.com/
- https://wakelet.com/
- https://raindrop.io/
- https://booky.io/
- https://www.knowies.com/
- https://carrylinks.com/
- https://www.zotero.org/
- https://pinalist.com/
- https://web.ggather.com/
- https://lasso.net/
- https://onekeep.com/
And the last one, is mine: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive
My bookmark manager is also a web scraper.