So, bookmarks. Got a bunch of somewhat connected thoughts
- Once we started using multiple devices having to manually sync the bookmarks file was a PITA and most browser addons sucked. Remember Xmarks?
- del.icio.us was amazing… until it got sold to Yahoo and they slowly asphyxiated it. The founder is still annoyed.
- We suffered without anything for the longest time. So much stuff that we just… forgot cos we had no way to keep track of those links.
- Pinboard.in is nice and we happily paid for the subscription for years and years. But we underutilized the service when we were not working in the tech sector so we really weren’t getting the most bang for our buck. The UI is super basic which is super nice and super fast but… maybe a tiny bit of CSS to at least put some nice typography, please? We also never used the social features since most people keep all of their bookmarks private.
- Most browsers now have built-in bookmarks syncing but if you have a zillion bookmarks good luck keeping them organized. And you’ll need more luck to sync between browser ecosystems, so you’re back to tools like yMarks.
- Most social media sites offer some form of bookmarking but if you lose your account you are fucked. A while ago we lost our tiktok account and… it did hurt for us to lose access to the stuff we had saved in that account.
So now we spun up a quick Linkwarden instance and we’re gonna try it out. So far it’s nice and sleek and slick… but it does look like the devs are concentrating a whole lot of effort in the appearance of it and not enough in the basic features unless they involve AI. It also doesn’t support bookmarklets opting instead for full browser add-ons. We’re only using a quick Docker command but it was easy to get it going, which is a plus.
But for now… we’ll use it and see what’s what. Hopefully in the future it’ll obtain the ability to archive videos since tiktok is currently one of our main avenues for content discovery e.g. cocktail recipes and builds.
We did look at other tooks like Bibsonomy, Grimoire, Wallabag, Karakeep, Servas, and Faved. They all look nice.