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Show HN: LinkAce – Self-hosted, FOSS bookmark archive
- egeozcan 6y agoDoes it sync with [insert my browser of choice]? (Not a lazy question, I did look at the website but found no clues - it seems that it does have an API though)
- Kovah 6y agoNo, sync is not available. Browser bookmarks are actually not the same as the bookmarks I keep in LinkAce, therefore I do not need any sync feature. You can read a bit more on the about page how the app is positioned. https://www.linkace.org/about/ https://www.linkace.org/about/
- egeozcan 6y ago> I use browser bookmarks for regularly accessed sites and have a separate application that takes care of all those links I would like to “keep in mind” but don’t want to pollute my browser bookmarks with I strongly feel like it could be both. You created something that does one thing (I assume) really well. Adding sync may sound like too much on top but we already are living in a world of isolated data islands, it may be a good idea to start building bridges. Maybe sync browser bookmarks in, mark them with a special tag, and only sync those out.
- gravitas 6y ago> Browser bookmarks are actually not the same as the bookmarks I keep in LinkAce You are not alone, I currently use Diigo with the same needs; the Diigo bookmark list is massive, unwieldy, goes back decades - the in-browser bookmarks are slimmmed down to just what I use commonly. What we really need is a new RFC "LinkDav" which follows in the footsteps of CardDav, CalDav and WebDav to round out our data portability lives. Want to try your hand at writing a RFC? :-) On the Import docs section it just says "...in the HTML format" - there's a Chrome, Firefox and IE version of HTML Export from Diigo, it would be helpful to understand which one would be the best for import to LinkAce: https://www.diigo.com/tools/export https://www.diigo.com/tools/export
- rakoo 6y agoThere is a standard already, called OPML that is already used in every RSS reader to store a list of feeds. Being XML behind, I'm sure it can be adapted to contain everything related to a bookmarking service; it's not a complete format like CalDAV and friends, but it looks like a solid base to build on.
- gravitas 6y agoOPML (I am familiar) could be used as a basis yep, but it's a file format which is more akin to vCard, vCal and iCal - CalDav, CardDav and WebDav are the transport(?) layers (API layers, operational layers, call them what you will) which sit on top of the file format standards providing the interoperability.
- bachmeier 6y agoThis looks nice based on my quick look at the demo and the feature list. Seems to be a well-polished project with a good design and documentation. The feature list says it does support notes (an important thing) but I don't see any other information about it or see any notes on the links in the demo. Would be nice to see how that works.
- Kovah 6y agoOh yes, I created a reminder to extend the documentation about notes. Here's a quick summary: they are used to store additional text for a link (whatever it might be) and can be added / edited from the link detail page, e.g. https://demo.linkace.org/links/87 https://demo.linkace.org/links/87. Although I do not use them a lot I think they can be used to add more context or details about a link without using the description. Like more details about why you added the link, how to find more details on that said link, and so on. I think this might become more powerful and useful when support for multiple users is ready. Notes can then be used like a low-level comment system.
- joiatu 6y agoBy quickly browsing the demo, I think that it could be nice to be able to fold and unfold the links in a list. Like that Lists would play the role of quickly accessible bookmark folder which is a nice feature.
- lucideer 6y ago> After you saved a link, it will automatically saved by the Internet Archive. A reliable backup without maintenance.~ The wayback machine does require maintenance, by the good people who work at archive.org. Might be a nice touch to included a Donate link here instead of implying it's somehow magic.
- mattowen_uk 6y agoAlternatively, add an option into linkace to archive the page locally?
- etherio 6y agoThat's the approach https://archivy.github.io https://archivy.github.io takes.
- Kovah 6y agoI thought a lot about this when I started working on the app. I decided against it because the Internet Archive has the proper tools, expertise, infrastructure and is - hopefully - a long term archive for websites. Maybe an alternative local backup is added in some future version, but I have no plans for it currently.
- Kovah 6y agoThere is a donation link in the LinkAce settings for the archive, but making it more prominent is a good idea. I actually donate on a regular base and hope others will do too. Edit: added a link to the features page.
- rounakdatta 6y agoThere's also a similar project buku (https://github.com/jarun/buku https://github.com/jarun/buku). I've been using buku for a while given its mature ecosystem around decoupled search-and-viz server, fantastic browser extension, easy browser importing, rich meta-information management et al. The buku server ideally would make sense to be local, and there enters LinkAce. Although I believe LinkAce has slightly different goals than buku, more around preservability and portability :)
- m000 6y agoBuku is great, but the browser extension still feels barebones (unless I've missed anything). I'm particularly bugged by the complete lack of auto-completion. E.g. when I tag a new bookmark as #devel, I would like to be offered suggestions for additional tags, based on my existing bookmarks. Possible suggestions to #devel would be #documentation, #api reference, #python, #javascript, #c etc. Similar for searching using tags. Moreover, auto-completion suggestions would save you from having to define and remember personal tagging conventions. E.g. shall I use #recipe or #recipes? Is it #open source or #open-source? I'm also missing the option to somehow create bookmarklets based on tags, so I can replace static bookmark folders in the browser. I believe these features would also be relevant for LinkAce (if not already implemented). For Buku, adding the functionality is in my backburner project list.
- based2 6y agohttps://github.com/wallabag/wallabag https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag Self-hostable PHP application allowing you to not miss any content anymore. Click, save and read it when you can. It extracts content so that you can read it when you have time. ref: https://linuxfr.org/news/quatre-annees-de-wallabag-it https://linuxfr.org/news/quatre-annees-de-wallabag-it
- rdschouw 6y agoWallabag is closer to Pocket than LinkAce. Wallabag also offers annotation, search on content and saving pay-walled content (with an account). To me, content search is the killer feature and was the first thing I looked for when looking at LinkAce.
- gprasanth 6y agoThese days I just mull over ideas long enough to see them built as opensource. This one, is nice! Long live LinkAce.
- l00sed 6y agoThis looks pretty cool. I'm a bookmarks nerd. I love collecting and organizing web resources in a useful way and returning to blogs with good content, or a website with nice design or accessibility features. I try to keep my bookmarks page up to date: https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/bookmarks https://l-o-o-s-e-d.net/bookmarks I wrote a quick script to parse the convenient json export from Firefox into collapsible divs for easier browsing.
- l00sed 6y agoHaving something self-hosted would give me a little more confidence in the long-term lifespan of my collection and its formatting.
- codetrotter 6y agoTbh I’d expect any browser plugins to break much much sooner than they are ever going to remove or make breaking changes to bookmark exports. Especially export bookmarks as HTML. Pretty sure that the HTML format that browsers export bookmark as has stayed pretty much the same since the days of Netscape Navigator.
- etherio 6y agoI'm exactly the same! I wrote a script [0] to convert the firefox json to a markdown file which I filter and put on my website [1] [0]: https://github.com/Uzay-G/garret https://github.com/Uzay-G/garret [1]: https://www.uzpg.me/attic.html https://www.uzpg.me/attic.html
- l00sed 6y agoHaha, awesome. I'll have to sift through this later!
- etherio 6y agoThis looks like a cool project. Here's a bit of feedback / thoughts I'm having related to a similar project, Archivy [0]. The problem I have with these type of solutions is basically the time it takes to just quickly bookmark. Browsers bookmarks are built-in, and do this pretty well - it's just one button next to the search bar. Solutions like these are a bit more limited as they aren't embedded into your browser UI, so you have to open a new website and paste the link in. This mere effort adds a layer of complexity which can kind of turn the user off to bookmarking. I wonder how this issue can be solved, in my project and yours... Maybe browser extensions can provide a more native experience with less "content to bookmark" time spent. Sync is another way to kind of counteract this -> people use normal browser bookmarks or whatever they prefer - and then there are options to sync them to your software for better organization / whatever your functionality is. However, hand-coding all of these integrations is difficult and that's why building a framework of plugins [1] so users can work and distribute these integrations themselves, is in my opinion, essential. [0]: https://archivy.github.io https://archivy.github.io [1]: https://archivy.github.io/plugins https://archivy.github.io/plugins
- mekster 6y agoMake it PWA and give it a sharing capability. Check how Unmark does it. https://github.com/cdevroe/unmark https://github.com/cdevroe/unmark
- Kovah 6y agoThank you so much for the input! Indeed, the process of bookmarking can be improved a lot. Browser extensions could be a proper solution, but I wanted to publish the app without having to build the extensions for various browsers. That's why there is a bookmarklet. Will take a look into the plugins, maybe they can help making this easier.
- gravitas 6y ago+1 to the Bookmarklet, it's what I use now for another service and it's simple and works (and can be hotkeyed in most browsers); I suspect the GP did not find the docs with the bookmarklet option as it's on the User Settings page, not the Links page: https://www.linkace.org/docs/v1/configuration/user-settings/ https://www.linkace.org/docs/v1/configuration/user-settings/
- mikewarot 6y agoSelf-hosting apps seem like the way we're going to go in the future. I do like the use or Archive.org to help the end user, and the rest of us at the same time.
- Kovah 6y agoI really prefer hosting applications on my own, instead of using any third-party service. Sure, the freedom comes at great costs (maintenance, updates,...), but I am willing to spend my time instead of taking the risk for my data and "critical personal infrastructure". The only downside is, and maybe ever will be, that self hosting is nothing for the casual user.
- mikewarot 6y agoWhat's really needed is an internet that connects everyone, where we can all just run our own applications, like it once was. If we get the OS security issue pounded out by adopting multilevel security, we could get back to actually freely using our computers. I'm waiting until I can deploy Free Pascal programs under Genode, or if it ever surfaces, GNU Hurd.
- buddha420 6y agoThis is pretty much exactly what Urbit is.
- aitchnyu 6y agoOne of my daydreams is a common self hosting specification and server that abstracts AWS, Google Cloud and Azure and hosts apps in one click. For example, myflickrr.com/common-host.json can specify Docker images for web and workers, provision them to AWS ElasticBeanStalk, set up scheduled tasks, create a S3 bucket, share a relational DB, set up logs and alarms, provision wildcard emails and captcha with *.mysite.com etc.
- rakoo 6y agoI feel like a part of what you want can be attained with yunohost (https://yunohost.org/#/ https://yunohost.org/#/): it's like a "web services distribution" where packages are complete applications.
- j45 6y agoThis looks promising. An extension or bookmark let is critical for adoption as it’s the easiest way to get bookmarks into the system. I would recommend trying out www.diigo.net to see how well their bookmarklet and extension works. It really is a game changer to get many more links into the system, combined with the ability to annotate individual sentences.
- axelthegerman 6y agoJust had a quick look around the demo account. Feels snappy. One thing I'm missing (maybe it's the mobile UI layout) is a search. I'm using pinboard.in for years and the search (either by tag or by URL/description) is by far the most useful to find anything later on. Nobody wants to click through dozens of pages of tags to find the one you're looking for :)
- Kovah 6y agoI really thought that the search icon to the left of the settings is clear enough for users to recognize. Did you recognize it as something else?
- beepboop43 6y agoI also don't see a search icon. Android + Chrome.
- bravura 6y agoI wrote a self-hosted link tool that I can add links from the command-line. I am curious if there is a good Python library for archiving the entire page, including assets?
- rakoo 6y agoThere's another project that's probably more popular on the french-speaking internet: shaarli (https://shaarli.readthedocs.io/en/master/ https://shaarli.readthedocs.io/en/master/). Same as LinkAce, it has custom text, tags, full-text search and thus can work as your own micro-blogging/blogging/pastebin tool. I'm looking for a solution in this space and I feel like none are really there although I could probably make it work: - I want input to be absurdly simple. The standard bookmarks are perfect, as is a simple bookmarklet but I want the same ease of use from my mobile - I want the content to be easily cacheable on my mobile so I can read it later while offline, if possible in a more readable rendering - I want the content of the link to be archived in a reliable way; Archive.org is a good way because there's a chance that the link is public anyway so it is of potential value to everyone - I want to have some liberty around the link, like the possibility of adding text with a little formatting and the possibility to have no link, just text, to act like its own article. Full-text search on everything is also important I think 2) is the most contraining requirement because it requires more mobile-specific development (probably an app), the rest can be worked around with many solutions already.
- mraza007 6y agoLooks great!! I’m about to host this project on my raspberry pi I love the UI very clean and simple
- elric 6y agoI'm hoping there's a way turning off auto-archiving using archive.org? Seems to defeat the purpose of self-hosting to some extent, and I'd really prefer hosting my own archive, which would allow for interesting search possibilities.
- Kovah 6y agoYou can turn off archiving to the Internet Archive, but there is n local archive solution available yet.
- mjgs 6y agoGreat looking project, are there any real life (i.e. non-demo) public instances running?
- franky47 6y agoOne of my goals for 2021 is to record every indie blog post I read (most are found here on HN). Bookmark managers are nice, but I needed additional metadata, and in a useable format for later display and analysis, so I ended up automating commits to a CSV file on GitHub[1], with a simple web UI for submissions. The REST API in LinkAce looks like a good alternative though. [1] https://github.com/franky47/post.francoisbest.com https://github.com/franky47/post.francoisbest.com
- FlashBlaze 6y agoI don't know why I didn't think of this approach before. This is amazing! A good project for Show HN imo.
- zakokor 6y agoI wrote Pegao last year to save and publish my own links organized in lists so that it would serve as a blog of links for others who might be looking for information on a topic and I released it as open source. This is the link to my profile https://pegao.co/@zakokor https://pegao.co/@zakokor
- qwerty456127 6y agoThe single most important feature I want of a bookmark manager is auto-tagging. Every-time I add a bookmark it should discover the subject it is relevant to and add tags automatically (and let me modify them when and I how I see fit, of course). Del.icio.us used to do this back in the days. Pocket premium is the only service I know which can do this today. Can LinkAce do this? I don't mind this being done with help of a 3-rd arty service.
- throwaway435234 6y agoI'm using ArchiveBox [1]. What does this solve that ArchiveBox doesn't? [1] https://archivebox.io/ https://archivebox.io/