I'm a huge fan of Refind (here's an invite). It integrates with Google search, so I can find my bookmarks right inline, it supports tagging and collections, a "Read It Later" feature like Pocket, and a New Tab extension that recommends new links to view based on links I've saved to my profile.
Highly recommended.
Ohhh nice—that's the feature I've missed from Evernote Clipper since I quit using Evernote as much. Will have to give that a try; thanks for the invite!
Yup but that doesn't show bookmarks inside Google search results.
Ah, true true. I wonder if that kind of other-site modification is even permitted within Safari?
It should be—the Evernote Web Clipper for Safari still surfaces search results inside Google search. I think the bigger issue is that a while back Apple removed their older free Safari Extensions gallery, and now hosts extensions through the Mac App Store, with its developer account requirement and review restrictions. I think just the extra hurdle is likely keeping people from shipping as many Safari extensions now, unfortunately.
Safari never had that many extensions but now it's basically a ghost town for them.
I use Keep It on mobile and as a Mac app.
It works pretty well. I use Safari on mobile so with the little share extension it adds, I can easily add bookmarks from my mobile web browsing. It’s all backed up to iCloud and syncs well across my Apple devices. It also lets me add tags to each bookmark, letting me search and filter through tons of bookmarks quite effortlessly.
This looks really nice! Since you made it, I wonder if you can provide a comparison between Histre and the macOS app HistoryHound. Have you tried it?
Thank you Yaser! I've not tried HistoryHound myself, thanks for the link. From reading their website, it looks like they focus just on searching your browsing history and bookmarks. It's really cool they support all browsers.
Histre on the other hand is "Effortless Knowledge Base".
The idea is that we throw away a lot of the signal we generate while doing things online and this can be put to good use for ourselves.
Histre aims to help with the whole "knowledge funnel", if you will. It aids the casual online research we all do (ie the explore -> filter -> decide loop). For example, it removes friction in taking notes on links you're looking at, with free-form tags that you don't have to create first and other such niceties that add up. And it easy to group notes into notebooks and share with teams. In short, when you have to look at a bunch of links for something (decide on your next vacation -- after this virus is behind us of course, people to hire, material for your next blog post, etc) Histre makes your life easier. But this is just the starting point for what Histre intends to do.
IMHO the biggest problem with apps like Evernote, Notion, Pocket etc is that it becomes digital hoarding, and not a knowledge base. And the knowledge base focused apps out there involve a lot of manual upkeep, which almost never happens, especially at work. Things start out okay and quickly fall into disrepair. I'm differentiating from the other note taking apps by automatically putting together a knowledge base (grouped by topic etc).
Thank you so much for the detailed reply, very much appreciated!
I guess I misunderstood the core vision for Histre. What got me interested in it was the Web History Logging feature and how I can log my browsing history with a funnel visualization. With a full-text search it would be a really amazing tool to recall links I forgot to save or snippets of information I remember only some keywords of or a timeframe where I googled them.
About the digital hoarding point: I don't know if you tried Roam Research, everyone is raging about it and they've got a point. It's novel graph db backed WikiLinks style bi-directional links make a very interesting approach for creating knowledge bases.
I think I'm totally missing your point on the "Effortless Knowledge Base" and also as a bookmarking tool. I don't know if you tried Raindrop.io (I reviewed it here on Capiche).
For how I see it now I would use Histre for logging my history and keep saving my bookmarks to Raindrop. If I wanted to recall something I didn't save I would resort to Histre for refinding it, add it to Raindrop and if I needed to further document it (Raindrop has Notes and Tags/Nested folders) I would add it to my Roam knowledge base or to Notion.
I'm still unsure if I don't get the point you tried to explain to me or if I'm just not a target user for Histre's knowledge base part. All I know is that I'll keep using Histre for the history logging feature!
Ah yes, that makes sense. Yes, please do use Histre for history visualization and search through it. That's one of my favorite features of Histre, if I may say so myself :-) I use that all the time.
I'm working on full text search on the content of the pages visited. The search right now is pretty primitive. But I'll be fixing this soon.
Re Histre's Knowledge Base part -- I was mainly trying to express that the plans I have for Histre are more than just making web history searchable. Our conversation here has motivated me to write in more detail about this. I'll share that with you.
Thank you again for becoming a member of Histre! I'd love to hear your feedback and make Histre work better for you.
Pinboard's like Craigslist: Been around forever, looks like some of the earliest websites and almost out-of-place in today's web, and yet is faster than most modern websites. I've got an old account there, should use it more.
Do you mostly save stuff via the bookmarklet? And do you pay for full-page indexing, or just the default bookmarking?
Yeah but it's really effective. I just use the bookmarking service, it's really cheap! And to save, I use the Chrome extension.
I'm surprised no one mentioned Raindrop ( 🔗 https://raindrop.io/).
It completely replaced Pinboard for me.
Didn't.... Raindrop used to be a photo organizer, something like a designer-focused Pinterst? Somehow that seems familiar.
At any rate, looks really nice. Is the free plan enough for you, or are you on the paid plan?
I don't think so, actually I think media files support was added later but I'm unsure on the timeline.
In its early phase it was basically a Pinboard clone, it had the same features but with a much better UI. Now it's just so much better.
I use the paid plan and my main selling points are:
- It saves an archival copy for every bookmark you add so broken links are no longer a problem. Seeing how ephemeral the web is this feature is a huge butt-saver.
- Mobile clients included for free
- API! As a Pythonista I have some scripts set up to import reddit saved links for example. You could write your own importers and parsers.
- Full text search
- Very pretty
- All of Pinboard features
You organize bookmarks with nested folders and/or tags and an awesome thing is that you can set custom icons for folders. I just love it.
For 2,6€/month it's just a steal for me!
Ah very cool—archival copies would be great, and that's a very cheap subscription. Looks like it has a ton of apps too. I'll have to check it out!
I bought a lifetime deal for Qlearly, and I have really enjoyed using it so far. You can create various boards and then multiple lists on each board. It's very Trello-like.
Do you find yourself spending much time organizing bookmarks in it? And do you have a workflow for bookmarks, Trello style, where you move bookmarks between lists?
I'd like to see a notebook function in GSuite. Google Keep had big promises but it is a letdown. My need for bookmarks is always framed by time and the project I'm working on. Saving bookmarks in Chrome is messy.
I see apps like Quip and Coda...it would make my day if someone could figure out how to stitch all the google products together into a quasi notebook/collaborative workspace
It's funny—both with notes and with team chat tools, Google almost has everything that would make a killer service but they never quite pull everything together.
Mine are all done in Chrome, sync across all devices.
Its a pain though having to manually clean them up ...
I use the Bookmarks toolbar in Chrome for all my shortcuts - so I have access to pages at a single click. But beyond that I don't have favorites.
I thought that is what Google was for?
Goold old Firefox! It syncs between all my devices and it's easy to keep them organized.
How long have you used it—and do you find yourself needing to clean up the bookmarks often?
I use browser (in Safari) for my most frequently visited sites—and the browser bar for bookmarklets (though I don't use them as much as I used to).
Then, for years I saved longer websites (longform reading, recipes, reference stuff) to Evernote with the Evernote Clipper, then used Pinboard and Apple Notes for that for a bit, and now sometimes use Notion. Often though I'll just save articles to Instapaper to read later and trust I can find them through Instapaper's search if I want them again. I'm bad about saving links, figuring I can just re-find stuff via Google again later, which is a bad habit so I should get back into bookmarking.
I've been a Pocket user for years and I'm very satisfied. The fact that it was acquired by Firefox means a lot to me. It's pretty rare to see nice SaaS being merged with other organizations than GAFA. Anyway, Pocket allows me to read my content offline which is the main reason I use it. However, I would love to be able to create groups/categories of links I could publicly or privately share.
Also, nowadays, saving links is a no-brainer. However, to my eyes, finding them when you need them most is the next step.
Let's take this simple use case: I've saved a link about how to write cold emails with the tag "Cold email" in Pocket. In the future, if I'm looking for tips about how to write cold emails in my search engine I would like Pocket to notify me about links I've saved contained keywords contained in my research.
Actually that was one thing I always liked about Evernote. If you used it to bookmark stuff, the Evernote Clipper could also show search results from your notes alongside Google search results in your browser. That way, say you clipped some research item then googled that topic again (or just wrote something about the item yourself), you'd see your note with the other top results. Pretty handy, enough that it kept me using Evernote for years even if it wasn't my favorite app for writing notes.
I use Google bookmarks, but project-specific, adding them to Notion lately as well
I'm in the Apple ecosystem, so I pretty much just rely upon Safari.
For stuff I want to utilize multiple times, like a color generator, I created a few main category folders and then a ton of subcategories using folders for bookmarks.
If it's just an article I want to read later, I throw it onto the reading list in Safari.
Safari's reading list is one Apple feature I've never used to save articles (other than hitting it by accident), despite using Safari by default everywhere. Though I do like the reading mode for reading articles in the browser without saving them first.
Same sentiments exactly! Have you noticed reading mode gets you through some paywalls? =)
Haha yeah, tends to work with ones that block scrolling and show a popover over the text.
Otherwise, Incognito mode and Outline/Instapaper tend to work for many others. Or Googling the link and clicking the result...
Same. Instapaper works for FT most of the time love it. Haven’t tried Outline
Been using gettoby.com for the last couple of days and really enjoying it! they have some good assortment of keyboard shortcuts for mac as well!
I am still "in love" with bookmarks. I bookmark websites in Google Chrome and have it basically "connected" with a Word Document. So for every bookmark created their is an entry automatically created in a table in word, that has the Link, "Name" of the page and date. I always wanted to change the workflow to a private website, that basically replaces the Word Document in this workflow, but the editing is way faster and easier in word, as you have all formatting tools. I would always recommend at least three sorting structures of bookmarks: 1. By content 2. By date 3. By Favourites.
Wow that's super cool! How do you sort the content inside the Word document? Or do you manually move stuff around to organize and then rely on search?
I was an old fan of delicio.us a long time ago and I have never found any bookmarking tool with all the features that I wanted. And trust me I tested almost all (Pocket, toby, raindrop, diigo ...)
However I found two years ago one of my favorites bookmarking tool called Bookmark OS and I stuck with it. I'm using Bookmark OS almost every day and I really love it.
Hope it helps!
It still blows my mind that Delicious is owned by Pinboard (and shut down). What is still missing in Pinboard versus the original del.icio.us to you?
Bookmark OS looks intense; amazing to see that many features built around bookmarking. The preview pictures look really nicely done. What's your favorite thing about Bookmark OS?
I use the basic bookmarks in Chrome for mundane things like links to searches in BitBucket's issue tracker. But the real bookmarking tool I use is Evernote's Web Clipper. That actually keeps me using Chrome as my primary browser. I have over 45K notes in Evernote of which around 38K are clipped.
Evernote gets some criticism but there are easy things you can do within it to make a smarter product. I use saved searches a lot but also heavy use of home pages around a topic, that link many clipped pages together. I also use casual linking to clipped notes in my own writing in Evernote, which gives me a contextual bookmark as I write which I can be confident is not going away.
Woah that's a ton of clipped bookmarks! Do you use its Chrome add-on to show Evernote clipped notes inside Google search results, or do you usually just search inside Evernote.
Are those home pages things you write manually to catalogue notes?
The biggest problem with the volume is their iOS client bogs down with just the metadata, if you don't keep it updated by opening regularly.
Yes, I find a lot of serendipitous reminders from the Chrome search show Evernote results. It's a double-filter that I've found something useful/interesting in the past and it's relevant to the current search.
My home pages vary - some are extremely ephemeral whilst I'm gathering thoughts. Others are more like a biblio or longer-form prose where multiple links are included to other notes alongside comments.
I've been using pinboard.in to save my bookmarks for a decade now. I like that it's a small, independent business that isn't going to disappear like del.icio.us did. For articles I plan to read later, I'll save the link in OmniFocus or Instapaper. Articles I need to read go to OF and articles I'd like to read–but likely won't get to–end up in Instapaper.
The wild thing is that Pinboard acquired Delicious after they switched parent companies a few times. Amazing story of a smaller company winning by staying focused over the longterm.
That's a great idea on putting stuff you need to read in a to-do list! I tend to put those in an Instapaper folder, but that's even easier to forget as it's more out of sight.
I’m also a fan of Raindrop, like the visual bookmarks and being able to access them from any device/browser.
If I find something interesting that I might have use for later, I’ll add it to Raindrop.
If I find something interesting that I think I should be using I sign up for an account. Pretty much everything has drip marketing, so they’re going to remind me to use it.
I learned about Toby for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-chrome/hddnkoipeenegfoeaoibdmnaalmgkpip?hl=en). Has anyone tried it?
I was just looking at that again recently after @SteveMathew recommended it in a discussion about managing browser tabs. Have you started using Toby yet?
I save bookmarks right in Chrome. Thanks to the Humble New Tab Page extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/humble-new-tab-page/mfgdmpfihlmdekaclngibpjhdebndhdj I can see all the bookmarks when I open a new tab.
The terminal-style theme in Humble New Tab is so nostalgic!
That link to Recently Closed would be handy too.
Do you have to carefully organize your bookmarks in folders to keep that page from getting overwhelming, or does it do anything to float your popular/recent bookmarks to the top?
I use https://bear.app/ for everything, to keep my bookmarks. However is incredible how it it looks like https://raindrop.io/
I came from pinterest or pocket, and delicious app 😅, but I 'm still obsessed with getting something more visual.
Bear's a really nice notes app! I already have too many writing apps (iA Writer and Ulysses are my favorites) but otherwise would very likely use it as well.
there is bookmarklet for save to trello, so there are some links that I know I going to take some action it, will save it to Trello. I use Trello like my ideas bank.
Gottcha, great solution—similar to how @aaron_stroud mentioned saving actionable links to OmniFocus, and stuff to read later that's less actionable to Instapaper.
Looking for a better way to plan remote meetings across time zones, and keep up with events. What software is doing that best today?
Wait you can search Chrome bookmarks in Alfred?!? 🤯