🕵️♂️ Do you use a bookmark manager? Which one?
Hey all, I'm building a bookmark manager as my side project, and wanted to ask:
🕵️♂️ Which one do you use? Perhaps a browser's built-in?
🧐 What features do you like or miss there?
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I use this: https://www.gettoby.com/ Find it simple and straightforward. Am interested in comparing with other suggestions tho.
Looks like its use case is for organizing an in-progress/research/commonly used tabs, am I right?
I use Bookmark Ninja (bookmarkninja.com). Previously used Raindrop, Pocket, Pinboard. I dearly miss X-Marks (formerly FoxMarks, acquired by Lastpass at some point, and shutdown about a year ago).
The feature I miss (and think about creating a solution myself) is that Xmarks was a bookmark manager, so much as a bookmark sync tool that work between different browsers. So you still had the native bookmark features of a given browser, but you always had the bookmarks that you created on your phone, work machine, home machine available elsewhere. Given that I'm not browser loyal, that was a huge feature and the single reason I was willing to pay for Lastpass Premium (it came with Xmarks).
Thanks for sharing! Syncing is indeed a must-have feature. And you're right, it makes it so much easier to hop between different browsers. Why have you switched from Raindrop & Pinboard to BN, what do they lack?
BN works well, has a nice interface and is the least disruptive to my workflow. Still not as nice as XMarks was.
When I say syncing, I mean XMarks would update your native browser's bookmarks/favorites with any changes you've made (any browser that supported the XMarks extension/addin/addon - at the time, Firefox, Chrome and Opera all had an extension). When you interacted with your bookmarks, you interacted with your browser's native bookmarks/favorites. So at work (official work browser is Chrome), I would see all my bookmarks. If I added a bookmark (Ctrl+D), I would see that bookmark under Favorites in my Firefox Developer edition browser favorites, when I got home. So not just making my links available via the cloud - actually synchronizing the native "Favorites"/bookmarks between browsers.
With BN, my homepage is my BN Dashboard. If I want to interact with something I navigate to my homepage (actually, I leave that tab open all the time), and find the link I'm after.
I didn't care for Raindrop's look and feel. It presents itself as completely separate from my browser. I want something that simply fixes a short-coming of my browser.
Pinboard is very keyboard driven, which is not how I think of my browser. So, again, too disruptive to my personal workflow.
Oh, I got you. Thanks for such an extensive answer. Browser syncing is a killer feature 💪 I'd work on it.
I use Bublup. It's transformed my approach to internet research and I highly recommend checking out!
I love how I can organize by category in it.
Thanks! Resembles Pinterest. I guess they are after a different audience?
It does resemble Pinterest but it's more of a UI choice I believe. I believe they call it a visual bookmark manager. You can share folders and such but it is geared towards private bookmark collection.
I am now evaluating how necessary/helpful is having a website screenshot attached to the bookmark, does it really help in navigating/searching through bookmarks or vice versa makes it harder. For those who have lots of bookmarks (as myself), I'm leaning towards the latter. What do you think? Would it help, or just overcomplicate the UI and navigation?
I agree with @thekreator I believe a visual feature would help - along with a paragraph or title. I have so many bookmarks that pictures + text jog my memory of what the heck I actually saved.
A toggle on / off would add value for more visual people.
@thelandofrandom @thekreator thanks for sharing your thoughts, really valuable. I guess we have the same pain point: to easily find the right bookmark when you need it, and when you just remember a bit of context about it.
Absolutely!
Of course! 👍 Exactly the same pain point.
I agree with the idea of being able to turn visual/contextual cues on or off.
I would love the visual feature :), maybe it could be an option, which you could turn off if you have lots of content. And tags based would be nice and ideally, I would want the content of the website at least a few paragraphs/title or whatever to be searchable.
I use my browser's bookmark manager and also Google Bookmarks (https://www.google.com/bookmarks).
Out of all of them, I like raindrop the most.
I'm happy with Evernote. It creates a separate note with the bookmark, and I'm able to put my notes about the bookmarked page.
So you put some notes for each bookmark you save? Does it help with finding it later on?
Yes, sure. The basic search function works well.
i use notion
Notion is so cool. I use it to manage my side projects, and also to collect links there sometimes. It lacks decent search, tho.
Hey,
I use the Bookmark manager from Brave
Haven't tried it, will check. Do you use it also for development/debugging?
I desperately tried to managing bookmarks, using chrome or raindrop, but eventually all my management was to put all bookmarks in one folder and start again :)
Yep, eventually I've ended up with cca 500 bookmark in "Other Bookmarks" folder 😳
Since bookmarks are essential for me, I've created a chrome extension which allows me to keep flat folder structure and instead attach tags.
I tried it once but was somewhat overly complicated for me 🤷♂️
Yeah, usually it always ends the same with built-in managers, I guess folders are the root of evil. It should be reimagined, at least (auto?)tags, and no folders.
How many bookmarks do you have saved in Chrome roughly?
~1500 :)
Cool, we are in the same niche, I have almost 2k 😬
Hi @edgar_hq . From what I read in your comments I had the same issue than you and we are finishing building https://www.save-tech.uno/
We are still finishing Alpha while we get set up with Google for the Chrome extension validation. Let me know if it's what you were looking for, and if not, what would you miss 🙂
Hi @Mazaira, looks good. I'm thinking in the similar direction 👍
I use Toby ( https://www.gettoby.com/ ) and I'm pretty much happy with it. 😀
Looks cool! Thanks for sharing. Though that's for organizing in-progress/research/commonly used tabs. My pain point is with almost 2k saved bookmarks (saas/web apps/startups/tutorials/etc) that could be handy sometime in the future, but not those I need right away.
I don't use a bookmark manager. What features would you include?
I like to collect startups/services that I find interesting/useful, but later, finding the one I need is quite hard and tedious as I can't recall the exact bookmark title. So context-aware search would be a must-have. How does it sound?
I would be happy to work on the design parts of it for sure. Would you be using a web framework?
That's nice! Do you use Figma? Yes,
Svelte- want to try something new.Yes I use Figma a ton. I don't know how to use Svelte. Sorry 😞. I could do the design though.
I'm still investigating on Svelte, perhaps I would go with Next.js, as Svelte does not have a solid TS support from what I can tell. Let's keep in touch, I'm defining a feature set atm.
Ok sounds good! My email is [email protected]
Btw if not a bookmark manager, how do you save/organize websites?
What I mean is that I just use the bookmark manager Google Chrome gives you
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I like how minimalistic Keep's UI is. Never tried it though, looks like adding/managing bookmarks there could be tedious, isn't it?
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I see, glad that it works well for you 👍