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Who uses Bookmarks any more? I don't. Instead, if I like a page I want to re-visit, I simply Print it to PDF. Then, I move all the PDF's from my Desktop ever

by mmjaa 10y ago

Who uses Bookmarks any more? I don't. Instead, if I like a page I want to re-visit, I simply Print it to PDF. Then, I move all the PDF's from my Desktop every week, into their own permanent storage location .. meaning that I have every interesting web page I've ever read since 2000. Trouble is, now I have a large PDF collection to manage. I get along fine with "ls -l | grep <something>" this and "pdf2txt <blah.pdf> | grep <something>" that .. but of course, this is not as 'clean' as if I had a Bookmark Manager to do all my searching/grep'ing/grok'ing/etc.

SirFatty 10y ago
Can't tell if you're joking or not. That's the kind of think using bookmarks avoids.
jonathonf 10y ago
That sounds so obvious yet is brilliant... no more link-rot for any of those interesting sites you bookmarked years ago... I suppose the next logical step would be to save the page with assets so it can be made available for posterity. Not sure what impact that would have on storage use but it would at least enable full text search.
- vkorsunov 10y ago
  We working on bubblehunt.com ... this is search platform, add any resources and get full text search for bookmarks, articles and other
dorian-graph 10y ago
I still use bookmarks (Pinboard) but I like your approach. I'm slowly trying to remove all reliances on third-parties as I can as they're too ephermal. I'm guessing you went with print to PDF because saving the page from the browser would result in broken pages? Have you found that the PDFs don't look very good for some websites? Alternatively, you could use a tool or extension that does full-page screenshots and then run image optimisation on them. I do this a lot for local Pinterest-type inspiration store. At the moment I use [Nimbus](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nimbus-screenshot-app/aecjogkncpbkjfobfnoaiepipllcadhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nimbus-screenshot-...) but it seems like evert few months the extension I'm using starts to fail with certain websites (scrolljackers, mostly), and I switch to a different, newer extension. Alternatively again, but back to saving websites, surely someone's created a nice tool that will download a page to store it as an archive that won't be broken? Pinboard for example has archiving for an extra fee, so I wonder how he does it at his scale. Related to your problem grep'ing, I'm slowly working on a small idea to have a local tagging/metadata approach for finding things.
- r3bl 10y ago
  > Alternatively again, but back to saving websites, surely someone's created a nice tool that will download a page to store it as an archive that won't be broken? Wallabag[0] does that. It's a self-hosted Pocket-like read-it-later service that strips the page and saves the text of the article in a local database, therefore allowing you full text search right from your own server. It even adds some additional neat features like adding notes to the articles. The only downside: damn those two currently available themes are awful. [0] https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en
apjana 10y ago
What are the issues you see in using Google Cache or archive.org to search older/lost pages?
- r3bl 10y ago
  ...or using the bookmarking service that extracts the copy of the page (with Wallabag and Pinboard being two that do that that I can remember on top of my head).
js2 10y ago
> Who uses Bookmarks any more? "Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?" (19 days ago, 451 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064096
yeukhon 10y ago
I actually thought of having creating a bookmark utility for command line, because I have a lot of commands I use. I could create them as aliases, but I also want the ability to keep track of them and have a description what they do, browse and grep, change parameters and etc.
- meribold 10y ago
  I use fzf [1] to achieve something similar. I have a file with commonly used commands and a key binding to select one using fuzzy search and paste it to stdin. Here's a demonstration: https://asciinema.org/a/8xkwh9579ry3u3t8a9nnsa7o9 https://asciinema.org/a/8xkwh9579ry3u3t8a9nnsa7o9 I can link my dotfiles if you're interested. [1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
gkya 10y ago
So you have one datapoint and you can declare the obsolescence of bookmarks?
dredmorbius 10y ago
"I don't need this" doesn't mean someone else doesn't. I would agree that bookmarks, generally, are a poor fit to current needs or requirements. When a typical hard drive was, say, 100 - 500 MB, the idea of only saving the URL, and not the content, could be argued. With mobile devices having 128 GB - 1 TB of microSD storage, there's no reason you cannot store everything you've read, or at least everything you're interested in, locally, on desktop, laptop, or mobile. Which is what you've done. But you're running into the underlying problem (as am I): a pile of randomly-titled, poorly-metadata'd PDFs isn't particularly useful. There are tools -- Zotero and ... some others -- which manage references, but IMO do so quite poorly. The problem is that what they introduce is a metadata vetting and management problem, and one that IMO GUI tools manage quite poorly. The fact that the tools aren't available on Mobile (I use an Android tablet almost exclusively, because reasons, and yes, it sucks in a great many ways), makes this problem all the more nontractable. I have the same problem, it turns out, with bookreaders. I use two, mostly: PocketBook and FBReader, with ~2,000 or so references. Unfortunately, other than title and author search, I've little by way of organisation of these, which is ... a major problem. I'm using Pocket, The Article Management Tool that Gets Worse The More You Use It[tm] (https://redd.it/5x2sfx https://redd.it/5x2sfx), which ... suffers many of the same problems, and adds a few more of its own.
apjana 10y ago
Coming to personal preferences, I do. And that was one of the main reasons I wrote buku. And I don't store the context, just a pointer to the context. Just like you don't normally pass a full structure by value over the stack but use a pointer. When I need the context I check the original link. If it's not there I try Google Cache or archive.org. If it's lost, I find an alternative (thanks to the title and notes fields in buku). That's more or less my workflow when in comes to the 8K odd bookmarks I have.
- apjana 10y ago
  But again, I would emphasize it's very much a personal preference.

by mmjaa 10y ago

SirFatty 10y ago

Can't tell if you're joking or not. That's the kind of think using bookmarks avoids.

jonathonf 10y ago

That sounds so obvious yet is brilliant... no more link-rot for any of those interesting sites you bookmarked years ago... I suppose the next logical step would be to save the page with assets so it can be made available for posterity. Not sure what impact that would have on storage use but it would at least enable full text search.

vkorsunov 10y ago
We working on bubblehunt.com ... this is search platform, add any resources and get full text search for bookmarks, articles and other

dorian-graph 10y ago

I still use bookmarks (Pinboard) but I like your approach. I'm slowly trying to remove all reliances on third-parties as I can as they're too ephermal. I'm guessing you went with print to PDF because saving the page from the browser would result in broken pages? Have you found that the PDFs don't look very good for some websites? Alternatively, you could use a tool or extension that does full-page screenshots and then run image optimisation on them. I do this a lot for local Pinterest-type inspiration store. At the moment I use [Nimbus](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nimbus-screenshot-app/aecjogkncpbkjfobfnoaiepipllcadhe?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nimbus-screenshot-...) but it seems like evert few months the extension I'm using starts to fail with certain websites (scrolljackers, mostly), and I switch to a different, newer extension. Alternatively again, but back to saving websites, surely someone's created a nice tool that will download a page to store it as an archive that won't be broken? Pinboard for example has archiving for an extra fee, so I wonder how he does it at his scale. Related to your problem grep'ing, I'm slowly working on a small idea to have a local tagging/metadata approach for finding things.

r3bl 10y ago
> Alternatively again, but back to saving websites, surely someone's created a nice tool that will download a page to store it as an archive that won't be broken? Wallabag[0] does that. It's a self-hosted Pocket-like read-it-later service that strips the page and saves the text of the article in a local database, therefore allowing you full text search right from your own server. It even adds some additional neat features like adding notes to the articles. The only downside: damn those two currently available themes are awful. [0] https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.org/en

apjana 10y ago

What are the issues you see in using Google Cache or archive.org to search older/lost pages?

r3bl 10y ago
...or using the bookmarking service that extracts the copy of the page (with Wallabag and Pinboard being two that do that that I can remember on top of my head).

js2 10y ago

> Who uses Bookmarks any more? "Ask HN: Do you still use browser bookmarks?" (19 days ago, 451 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14064096

yeukhon 10y ago

I actually thought of having creating a bookmark utility for command line, because I have a lot of commands I use. I could create them as aliases, but I also want the ability to keep track of them and have a description what they do, browse and grep, change parameters and etc.

meribold 10y ago
I use fzf [1] to achieve something similar. I have a file with commonly used commands and a key binding to select one using fuzzy search and paste it to stdin. Here's a demonstration: https://asciinema.org/a/8xkwh9579ry3u3t8a9nnsa7o9 https://asciinema.org/a/8xkwh9579ry3u3t8a9nnsa7o9 I can link my dotfiles if you're interested. [1]: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf

gkya 10y ago

So you have one datapoint and you can declare the obsolescence of bookmarks?

dredmorbius 10y ago

"I don't need this" doesn't mean someone else doesn't. I would agree that bookmarks, generally, are a poor fit to current needs or requirements. When a typical hard drive was, say, 100 - 500 MB, the idea of only saving the URL, and not the content, could be argued. With mobile devices having 128 GB - 1 TB of microSD storage, there's no reason you cannot store everything you've read, or at least everything you're interested in, locally, on desktop, laptop, or mobile. Which is what you've done. But you're running into the underlying problem (as am I): a pile of randomly-titled, poorly-metadata'd PDFs isn't particularly useful. There are tools -- Zotero and ... some others -- which manage references, but IMO do so quite poorly. The problem is that what they introduce is a metadata vetting and management problem, and one that IMO GUI tools manage quite poorly. The fact that the tools aren't available on Mobile (I use an Android tablet almost exclusively, because reasons, and yes, it sucks in a great many ways), makes this problem all the more nontractable. I have the same problem, it turns out, with bookreaders. I use two, mostly: PocketBook and FBReader, with ~2,000 or so references. Unfortunately, other than title and author search, I've little by way of organisation of these, which is ... a major problem. I'm using Pocket, The Article Management Tool that Gets Worse The More You Use It[tm] (https://redd.it/5x2sfx https://redd.it/5x2sfx), which ... suffers many of the same problems, and adds a few more of its own.

apjana 10y ago

Coming to personal preferences, I do. And that was one of the main reasons I wrote buku. And I don't store the context, just a pointer to the context. Just like you don't normally pass a full structure by value over the stack but use a pointer. When I need the context I check the original link. If it's not there I try Google Cache or archive.org. If it's lost, I find an alternative (thanks to the title and notes fields in buku). That's more or less my workflow when in comes to the 8K odd bookmarks I have.

apjana 10y ago
But again, I would emphasize it's very much a personal preference.