Ask HN: How Do You Bookmark?

Hi HN,

It seems I’m always drowning in a sea of bookmarks, open tabs, and saved links that I "save for later"—only to completely forget about them. This has been frustrating and has pushed me to start building my own filing/bookmarking system.

I want something I can access from the browser, the terminal, and my phone, and I’m just beginning to put it together.

That brings me to my question: How do you manage saved information? Specifically, how do you organize, search, and tag your content? More importantly, how do you design an interface that makes it easy—and actually appealing for meat-brains like me—to return to and use what you’ve saved?

For instance, I’ve thought about building a browser extension to replace my YouTube feed, which I often scroll through mindlessly, with something more intentional. I’d also love to annotate PDFs, websites, and other content, then store and access it all in a unified space.

I think The Problem I keep running into is just friction. I’ve tried apps like Obsidian, but I find them hard to maintain. I even wrote scripts to clean up things like images and URLs automatically, and set up sync, but it felt clunky, and I didn’t use it as much as I thought I would. Now I’m trying again and really want to get it right this time.

So I’m curious:

    What UI/UX features or workflows would make you actually use a system like this consistently?
    Do you have ideas or examples of systems that are particularly low-friction and effective?
    Have you found workarounds for these kinds of challenges?
    Or are there tangentially related ideas or discussions you think might be relevant?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences!

14 points

・

shreyshnaccount

・

2 months ago

30 comments

mmphosis ・ 2 months ago

I don’t bookmark. I have a "Home" page with "One-liners & Links of the Day." The links are listed in reverse chronological order by day. Only this month is kept on the home page. There are links to previous months’ home pages at the bottom. Since it's a web page, I am not constrained to how some “Bookmark” manager wants me to view links. I can add whatever I want. Annotations, color, and non-links like code snippets are in there. If there is Too Much Information (TMI) I collapse it in a detail / summary HTML tag.

If I actually go back frequently to a link or to a piece of code, I put that link or code snippet in a more permanent "Document" web page which groups the items by topic. For example:

    Typography

        — ‘ ’ “ ” • … × °
At the moment, I am keeping the web pages local. There is a duplicate on an actual web server so it can be accessed from other devices.
  • wonger_ ・ 2 months ago

    I like your idea of custom HTML homepage storing all your links and snippets.

    Do you feel it's easy to add links from your phone?

    A screenshot would be lovely, if you feel like sharing one.

    • mmphosis ・ 2 months ago

      I feel it is difficult to do anything on the phone and don't use it so much. Adding a bookmark temporarily on the phone and adding the link later is easier from the laptop.

  • shreyshnaccount ・ 2 months ago

    This seems like an interesting way to approach this problem. obviously this is different for everyone, but do you find a chronological approach useful? also do you manually edit the webpage? if you have some code thats helping you manage your system itll be cool if you can share it. I like the approach here, and making it a webpage makes it super easy to do some of the other things i wanted as well

    • mmphosis ・ 2 months ago

      Reverse chronological shows the most recent first which is useful.

      It's a manual system. Web pages, HTML and style are manually edited with a text editor. There is more code, HOWTOs and notes on my private home pages. Here is a public page:

      https://mmphosis.netlify.app/links/

rvrs ・ 2 months ago

1) For sites I come back to for reference or frequent utility, I use my Chrome bookmarks bar heavily. I have it synced to my Google account in the cloud, and segmented across different Chrome profiles (work email account for work things, personal for personal things, etc).

- Bookmarks to tools I access really frequently (like AWS dashboard) are top-level, and I remove the "Name" of the bookmark so it appears as just an icon in the bookmarks bar. There's a few of these quick-access icons for any given Chrome Profile setup that I have. For work I have Okta, AWS, and a work Wiki via Notion. For personal I have Youtube, email, my seedbox, and Plex.

- Everything else is split into folders for interests, projects, teams at work, etc.

- For things like recipes and articles I will back them up via Waybackmachine and archive.ph and bookmark that instead of the original site

2) For a form of digital scrapbooking for my various interests, of things that are not quite websites (images, videos, quotes, scraps) I use are.na heavily. I want to stress that this is scrapbooking and not a "notes system" a la Obsidian or Notion.

Leftium ・ 2 months ago

Some highlights from my post in a lengthy discussion about adding bookmarks to Kagi: https://kagifeedback.org/d/1560-bookmarks/39

bookmarks are notes that say "this URL is important or useful."

- often I want to add more notes

- adding text content of url to bookmark as note would help find bookmark later (and preserve content)

both bangs and bookmarks provide shortcuts for launching a particular URL

- bangs are just a special case of bookmarks that adds a trigger and/or query parameter(s).

I often want to attach notes/urls to tasks as I work on them.

- tasks will simply be notes with a due date and/or priority

- it will be simple to convert between bookmarks, notes, tasks, and bangs (they are almost identical)

bookmarks can be a todo-list of items...

- to read later

- to check when searching for something

- to do when following a (daily) routine

---

Also, I recently learned Google offers a bookmarking service: https://lifehacker.com/tech/google-has-a-secret-bookmarks-fe...

embeng4096 ・ 2 months ago

I have seen on HN suggestions for raindrop.io which another commenter suggested. You may also be interested in notado.app (https://notado.app/) -- I'm not a user, just have seen other HNers mention it alongside raindrop.

  • MollyRealized ・ 2 months ago

    I would heavily endorse raindrop.io as a paid user. I was looking for an alternative to Pinboard; after witnessing the founder's behavior/attitude on HN, I didn't want to funnel any more money to them.

  • bsnnkv ・ 2 months ago

    I own and run Notado, happy to answer any questions!

daf72 ・ 2 months ago

I have been using https://raindrop.io/ for this and find it quite useful. Never end up reading everything I save but it keeps my browser less chaotic and adding bookmarks from the browser extension and on iOS is seamless.

  • shreyshnaccount ・ 2 months ago

    Holy hell this looks really cool! its about 70% of what i need it to be out of the box! and it has a decent api as well. I might just end up using this. Anything you have in mind on the retrieval/ search side of things?

    • daf72 ・ 2 months ago

      I think it really depends on how you want to use it. There are 'Collections' which are basically like custom categories you can create as well as #tags. When you add a bookmark you can put it directly into one of your collections and add tags. I have created a few collections around high level areas but have generally just added bookmarks without sorting, then after I read them I will move them into a bucket. The highlighting feature is very nice as well.

      I would try it out for a few days and see how you like it. I definitely think there is something psychologically behind saving links and never reading them, I have quite the backlog.

      • alfirous ・ 2 months ago

        > I definitely think there is something psychologically behind saving links and never reading them, I have quite the backlog.

        It's like having peace of mind or hoarding—you never know when you might need those links down the road, but knowing they're stashed away somewhere is pretty comforting.

        I used Raindrop with 7,000 links, and I usually go back to some of them to recall or confirm information.

wruza ・ 2 months ago

Vivaldi has “add to this folder” in every folder in the bookmark bar. I just go there and add. Also its bookmark editing menu is just better. And it can middle-click open bookmarks without closing the menu. Chrome and FF bookmarks are almost useless ui-wise.

I still migrated to FF due to MV3 but it feels real shitty in comparison, tbh. Idk how people use it beyond dead stupid use cases.

how do you organize, search, and tag your content

I create a folder hierarchy on the bookmarks bar and sometimes custom-name bookmarks that are important to find. Search through url bar.

Once in a while I go through a folder and delete impulsive bookmarks.

Basically I perceive these as a filesystem. Would be nice if they were actually mapped into $HOME/Bookmarks.

  • shreyshnaccount ・ 2 months ago

    yes, ff is terrible at this. I have tried this approach too, but it gets overwhelming FAST. being slightly neurodivergent, its a non starter for me

    • wruza ・ 2 months ago

      There’s a guy here on HN who tried to “fix” bookmarks or start page. He also sells wallpapers for his extension. Idk how to find the post though. Maybe will update later.

1024kb ・ 2 months ago

I have moved all of my tech related bookmarks to Obsidian. I have a dedicated note for blogs I like to read, and a note for things that I want to read later. With obsidian sync, I get access to my bookmarks across devices, everything is just markdown, and I like that on Android, if I find an article I want to read later, I can use the share feature to share the page with the Obsidian app, and it will save a link at the bottom of page of whichever note you select. You can also tag things in Obsidian, which is useful for search.

davidsojevic ・ 2 months ago

I generally do one of two things when I want to "bookmark" something;

1. Open a new tab and leave it there until I get around to reading it later that day or the next morning; or

2. Drop the link into my instance of ArchiveBox [0] and will return to it a few weeks/months later or, more often than not, never again

[0] https://archivebox.io/

jppope ・ 2 months ago

Brave (browser) has features for most of the things you are asking about. they have bookmarks and read later. they also have great a great reader mode for speeding up your reading sessions. They have a mobile and desktop versions, just guessing the way that brave works they probably have something you can do in the terminal to connect as well

  • shreyshnaccount ・ 2 months ago

    Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve used Brave, and while it’s solid for bookmarks and reading, I’m looking for something more customizable-like adding tags, notes, the ability to run scripts on my data, and annotations- all in one place. Do you know if Brave has options for deeper integrations like this?

softwaredoug ・ 2 months ago

If it’s interesting long-form content I share on hacker news. Or favorite it.

howard941 ・ 2 months ago

I just star it in Firefox. If I want to return to it I use the everything box and type in something about what I'm looking for.

roland35 ・ 2 months ago

I honestly have stopped bookmarking sites! I can't keep track of them all and found it's easier to just search again

  • shreyshnaccount ・ 2 months ago

    Another mechanism I am looking to implement as a web extension is this: all my duckduckgo searches are also ran against a local save of my bookmarks, and get displayed on the side. atleast i think it will help me

theophilec ・ 2 months ago

wallabag.it is simple and reliable. And you can self host if you'd like