Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is There a Bookmark Manager That Actually Manages Bookmarks?
hackwrench writes: Most reviews of so-called bookmark managers focus on the fact that they can share bookmarks across browsers and devices and whether or not they can make your bookmarks public or not. Sometimes they mention that you can annotate bookmarks. Little is said about real management features like making certain bookmarks exclusive to one or a set of browsers or devices, checking for dead links and maybe even looking them up on archive.org. I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list of features that would be good to have. What bookmarks managers do you use and why, and what features would you like to see in a bookmark manager?
Lets me set bookmark profiles for different devices/environments, so I have my "Work" bookmarks distinct from my home use ones. Automatically synchronizes between all major browsers and devices. I mainly only keep smart bookmarks and daily-use ones, so I don't ever need dead link checking or any frills like that. Covers my needs.
I use the github issues database. It allows me to quickly tag each bookmark and add descriptions. Works good. The side benefit is that it pretty useful for lots of other things too.
If you use Windows .URL files, you gain several critical abilities: browser-independent storage, cross-browser utility, and searching and filtering driectly from Windows Explorer. The browsers I have used all support the ability to drag URLs directly from the browser address bar into Explorer or the Desktop to create these shortcuts. Not sure if you could then create methods and tools to support your other desired features like browser-exclusive shortcuts, but completely detaching URLs from any application-specific database is a good place to start.
My other bookmark manager is Google.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
So they all will tell me the last time I visited that site? They'll let me sort/search by keywords inside the URL? Easy drag/drop of bookmarks between folders?
Learn to love Alaska
1. Sometimes I have to rename the bookmark to something more meaningful than what's in the tags.
2. Use tags. Firefox has them and it makes my life so much easier. It beats sorting them into folders.
I'm not sure what to do about dead links. It happens. If you really, really need to save something forever, I assume it is something for reference, then save it to PDF and upload it to a cloud service.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1
To be honest, doesn't need much management.
but I stopped managing my bookmarks when Firefox & chrome started searching them and the text they contained. That plus google pretty much made bookmark management a waste of my time. Kinda like organizing my email. I just don't do it anymore. Use the search feature in your browser bar and give the bookmark a name with some useful keywords and blam, no more managing. If it's something you use a lot drop it in your bookmark bar. Come to think of it, that's one of the key things that keeps me on Firefox: I can drag and drop a tab directly onto my bookmark bar.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I really loved simplicity of delicio.us until it was broken by yahoo some years ago.
After that I was too suspicious to use on-line tools.
Later, Opera with one update got rid of my historical bookmarks.
Got sick with this. Now, if I may need it, I just email it to myself with set of probable keywords in the message for which I might be looking for in the future.
Are the features I want, but to say that the reviews said little about such features may be generous, because they actually said nothing at all about it.
was using X-Marks until recently. Works pretty well and syncs across desktops, laptops, & portable. Lately, I've been moving all of it to Evernote using their "Clip to Evernote" & Evernote's "Clearly". It's still free and accessible on all my devices. Evernote will index all the pages by the contents of the saved pages. Evernote often even does OCR on the graphics in the saved pages and includes that in the index. You can have your Google searches include your Evernote account (makes it easier to find stuff). It's hard to figure out which bookmark you want by the bookmark name.
What? No it doesn't.
Most reviews of so-called bookmark managers focus on the fact that they can share bookmarks across browsers and devices and whether or not they can make your bookmarks public or not.
Defines existing tech and excludes those features as insufficient.
Sometimes they mention that you can annotate bookmarks. Little is said about real management features like making certain bookmarks exclusive to one or a set of browsers or devices, checking for dead links and maybe even looking them up on archive.org.
Suggests three features they want.
I'm sure this isn't an exhaustive list of features that would be good to have. What bookmarks managers do you use and why, and what features would you like to see in a bookmark manager?
Asks for suggestions for existing tech, and features that your choice of tech doesn't do that you wish it did.
Seems pretty simple and straight forward.
I don't use a bookmark manager, I use google and my browser history. If I did use one though, I'd like it to archive to my desktop as html, then each time I request the page check for updates. If it differs then only backup the modified files. Let me access the site in an Apple Time Machine style interface.
(Oh no, I said Apple. Label me troll/flame bait/skatrboi.)
Back when Web directories could keep up with changes or something like that, I tried a lot to use them. My bookmark collection is practically one of those sites. When I find a bookmark where the link it is pointing to has disappeared, I go to archive.org and plug it in to see if it got the site. If it does, I update the bookmark to point there. I start out with a alphabet sprawled across the bookmarks toolbar, and then topics under that letter So I have P on the toolbar and under that I have Programming, and under that Game for game programming. I also have a G which has a Game folder for more general game playing topics. I would like most of my bookmarks to sync across all browsers but there are some sites that won't render very well with how I have a given browser set up, so I want those links exclusive to the browsers that they work right in. None of the search engines index archive.org and under A I have an archive folder that points to various collections on archive.org.
I use Pinboard, which doesn't sync to browsers at all, though it does import from them and there are extensions for most(all?) browers. It has excellent tagging capabilities. Every once in a while I switch browsers or do a fresh install of one, over time set up the bookmark toolbar. In theory it would be nice to have that stored in Pinboard, but on the other hand being forced to rethink what I most want easy access to can be a good thing. Having a different set that sync to mobile would be good.
With a monthly fee, Pinboard archives all of the pages you bookmark, so that handles dead links very well, and as we've all learned by now I hope, if we like a service we're usually better off paying for it than suffering ads, or the buyout from some giant corporation that will end or ruin it.
The managing that I would really like to see is the ability to view bookmarks based on tag in a graphical way with overlapping circles (think Venn diagram), and edit the tags on a bookmark simply by dragging it from one part of he overlapping circles to another.
ourpla.net is your planet
In the past, when I used to use bookmarks, I would have certain sites viewed on IE, certain sites on Netscape/Firefox and later certain sites on Chrome. Depending on the DE I was in, I'd even toss in Konqueror/Epiphany. Main issue was that certain browsers used a html file to store bookmarks, while some, like IE, used a Windows Explorer like file manager to sort them. Main issue was I couldn't migrate some of the bookmarks from one browser to the other.
However, of late, I've given up using them altogether. I have a whole bunch of tabs open, and then I also have some RSS feeds staged on the Bookmarks toolbar. That serves me pretty well.
One thing that is totally brain dead about any bookmark sync features I've tried with browsers is that if you delete a bookmark on one device, it will not delete it for all devices. That to me is just stupid. Its like they only half-sync: only added bookmarks, not deleted ones.
Worse, they can go, "Oh, I see that the browser you deleted a bookmark from is missing it. Let me add it back into your browser.
FireFox bookmark tagging is very good, but what really rounds it out is TagSieve, a fantastic FireFox extension that really should be added to FireFox itself:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1092878
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tagsieve
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tagsieve/#reviews
How about something that is never stored in plaintext remotely? Like you can manage your bookmarks, put them in subgroups, ideally move them across browsers and devices, but no one but you ever knows what bookmarks you saved?
Can you please find a newer cartoon, this one 378 has been seen at lest 100 times on /.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I've bookmarked a thousand web pages and haven't clicked on a single one of them. Let them go, people. Just let them go.
So what's so bad about it, in your opinion. Someone broke down the post for another user who complained and the complainer did a better job than you at expressing what he felt was wrong with it?
To check if a current site you are on is on archive.org have the following as a bookmark
javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+document.location.href;
It would have helped if you read the frgging summary. Can you name one that synchronizes across all your devices (and perhaps a shared section with appropriate auth system), and allows customizations on a per device basis? No? Yeah. You should read the summary next time.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'd settle for "do anything". Something that's a dumb storage device isn't "management". Maybe that's why so many slashdotters hate managers and management, they don't know what the word means.
Learn to love Alaska
I have been working on this project for the past year now, and it has a lot of the features you are looking for. For instance, about dead links: Any time you bookmark a page, it is automatically archived to archive.org and archive.today, and then if the page goes down, you can view those archives instead. Similar to how some mentioned Evernote, we also index the full text of pages you bookmark, so you do not have to remember the names of the bookmarks, but can instead search through the text of the page. If you want to separate your work & home bookmarks, you can just tag them as such, and then later you can filter bookmarks using tags. There's also browser extensions for Chrome/Firefox/Opera, and a bookmarklet for others. Without further ado, here's the sign-up link(in case you like what you've heard): https://www.crestify.com/regis.... Invite code is needed too: "slashdot"(without quotes). I will be here to answer any questions you have, so feel free to ask.
Diigo all the way. To me, Diigo's killer features are in annotation by highlights and sticky notes ("Highlight text directly on any web page for personal reference or collaboration" and "Add text, comments or reminders directly on any web page with sticky notes"). Really makes paper obsolete.
I will settle for one that just synchronizes across all devices. like biology i prefer a mixed os lifestyle, even if I have a mac book and iPhone, My tablets are android just to be safe.
At the moment I manually deleted and re-add chrome bookmarks to Safari every once in a while. This keeps all those fairly close in sync. I have to do the same for contacts, too. fortunately I use google calendar, and gmail already so those stay in sync.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=bookmark+...
Enjoy, I can do this all week.
I haven't seen an announcement about systemd doing it yet, but there are a few hours left in this week's release cycle. And i'm sure it will be incompatible with all other bookmark managers and, in fact, all browsers.
I don't use bookmarks that much. Instead, I create a simple HTML page with links, with similar pages categorized together. I will benchmark pages that I'm interested in and eventually move them to the home page or delete them if they've been there for a while with me not using them. I manually propagate the homepage to other systems.
Yes. I was a long-time Opera user; used to pay for it on Windows (version 3?) and then, when it came out, I paid for the Linux version. I loved the bookmark system in the 12 and below versions. Like you, I had themes: folders and subfolders for certain topics. For example, a programming folder with different language/platform subfolders. Nearly everything was possible with just the mouse. To bookmark a page, you simply moused down to the desired sub-sub-folder, for instance, and clicked the bookmark-current-page-here entry. Ditto for locating and visiting a bookmarked page. I very rarely had to type anything: very rarely to search for a bookmark and just occasionally to rename the title of a page I was bookmarking.
I stayed on Opera 11.64 (there was some annoyance in 12) until about 6 months ago, when, because of an increasing number of page-rendering problems, I began trying out various browsers (including Vivaldi and Otter), and finally settled on Pale Moon (on Windows and Linux). I imported my Opera bookmarks and I can get close to the Opera bookmarking experience, but it's still not as smooth as the old Opera was.
Personal bookmarks manager available from anywhere.
https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli
I use Xmarks (paid customer for it and LastPass, do they even have a free version?) but it definitely has its flaws and I don't get the impression that the company puts ANY resources into it beyond basic maintenance and support. I've had times where bookmarks simply disappeared (e.g. 80% of a folder of links to client sites), and there's no reasonable way to go back and track down when or why.
In my case I assume it was a sync issue between browsers on multiple systems, but since it was a folder of sites I only needed to access every few months it left me with a big window for when the loss occurred. I could have downloaded all of the bookmark sets to be able to search (or otherwise track changes) but that's a one-at-a-time process through a clunky web interface. Last time I looked there was no way to search through the old bookmark sets, nor is there any kind of automated changelog or indication of what changed - not even a count of number of bookmarks in each saved backup. Even having a count of the # of bookmarks would have helped, because I could have looked for spots where the total number declined since I'm bad about doing cleanup.
Overall I'd call Xmarks "just good enough to keep me from actually deciding to try to roll my own solution" which is really a pretty low bar since I have some idea of the development scope I'd be facing.
fencepost
just a little off
You are doing it wrong. Bookmarks should be used a marker for hard to find sites that required a lengthy search process to find, or for sites that you open every day (right-click bookmark folder "Morning News", choose 'open all bookmarks'). If you have a thousand bookmarks and haven't spent the time to organize them in a system, you will never find what you are looking for; which requires you to use search for everything.
I like to do a little poking around before registering for a site, so I went to the top level and there's a link for joining a waitlist?
So sorry about the late response, I am not a regular on /. and I totally missed the notification.
Currently, since we are in beta, we have a waitlist system. Once you are cleared from the waitlist you receive an invite code. However, for slashdot users, the invite code "slashdot" will let you bypass the waitlist.