Right now, I have a mess of bookmarks, open tabs, and things saved haphazardly in different apps. I want a system where I can organize it all and also keep it reasonably private. Open to all suggestions, whether that’s an app or a tool or a personal trick or some completely different way of interacting with the internet.
Bookmarking this, some very helpful answers here.
I’m not going to use that one (the website makes a big deal about using AI to automatically tag things, and I’m trying to reduce LLMs in my digital life), but thanks for sharing! It otherwise looks like a cool app.
For the record, I’ve never touched the AI functionality and you don’t need to. It’s just there to make categorization easier if you’re into those kinds of aids.
I use instapaper. It’s an app and an extension.
Might actually swap to Wallabag soon though
Thanks for sharing these!
I have a tab group on my phone where I move all tabs I’ll look at later. I think there’s over 1000 tabs in there now
You could use a bookmarks manager / read-it-later service where you’d save every article you read (or at least the ones you find most interesting). Most of them have a tagging system for organising by topic, some of them (including Readeck, the one I use) even locally save the article’s content so you can search in it too, not just in the titles.
Readeck looks really cool! Can you sync across multiple devices? It’s not necessarily a dealbreaker for me if not (I can still consolidate/organize a lot of things better than I am now), but that would be a nice feature to have.
edit: also, can you associate links/articles with more in-depth notes than just tags?
Can you sync across multiple devices?
Your Readeck instance is the source of truth, every client syncs from it. A note though: Readeck does not have a cloud hosted version yet, it’s supposed to be coming in the later part of the year.
can you associate links/articles with more in-depth notes than just tags?
You can highlight pieces text and add comments to highlighted pieces, but no, you unfortunately cannot write down notes (like a summary) for a link.
Oh, OK. Thank you so much!!
I try to remember what it was called and type it into my address bar to see if it auto-completes from history. If so, cool. If not, then I have to convince myself that I wasn’t interested in looking back at that page in the first place.
Logseq for texts and links I want to archive and refer back to, Wallabag for articles and other texts I want to read later.
Logseq here too!! Readeck for the articles/pages.
Hi, thanks for commenting! Do you mind explaining more about how you use Logsec vs. Readeck? When do you use Logsec but not Readeck?
edit: also, can you add notes that are more in-depth than just tags to your articles and links on either of these? I wasn’t thinking about it earlier, but that would be a really nice feature
I use readeck to store webpages, mostly articles I like. I tag them, I share them, has a firefox extension so I can use it both at home and on the go. I do self-host readeck, that might be the biggest snag?
For everything else I use LogSeq. I read a book, i make a page, paste in the cover image, some details, and thoughts. Well, nowadays that happens automatically via a sync with my e-reader, but just to give you an idea. The daily notes are for everyday notekeeping: I do a cleanup here, I had a doctors appointment there, some good quote I found, an idea i had. Just the immediate dropzone for anything, but I do take care to use appropriate tags. Then in quieter times, I can start sifting through these, like a gardener pruning his plants: copying notes to pages they might belong to, or create new pages, link them up. And at the end, one can gape at the Graph showing all these connections, which in turn encourages another round of pruning. Ad infinitum.
EDIT: This article seems to give a good overview.
EDIT2: Quick video (youtube)
Thank you so much! Sounds like a pretty cool system.
Thanks! Do you mind explaining a little more about how you use these? When would it make sense to use Wallabag but not Logseq, or vice versa?
edit: also, can you add in-depth notes about the articles/links you save, like something more than just short tags?
Wallabag is just what Pocket used to be – you feed it a link and it extracts text from the article for you to read later. I also use it to sync articles with my Kobo (the alternative interface KOReader has built-in support). Usually when I’ve read the articles, I just archive them in Wallabag without any further processing.
Logseq is for anything else – tips and tricks, the odd article I want to archive in its entirety to have it easily accessible, howtos, documentation of my personal projects, creative writing, journaling… It works a little like my own personal Wiki. I sync my pages among several devices using Syncthing.
AFAIK, you cannot add long notes in Wallabag, just tags. If I wanted to do that, I’d probably copy the text or link to Logseq and do it there.
Thank you so much! This is really helpful. Logseq in particular sounds pretty interesting.
Joplin, which I self-host in the cloud. They have a browser extension that lets you clip articles.
Joplin looks neat! How does self-hosting in the cloud work? (I thought the choice was usually self-host vs. cloud host, but I know almost nothing about hosting.)
From a low tech solution, you can just do daily backups to something like Google Cloud/Dropbox. You can automate it. So you can have the desktop Joplin app, as well as one on your phone.
And they both sync to your cloud version.
The next level is something like using AWS S3. This is a lot more technically challenging.
Oh, OK! I probably won’t do any of those because I’m trying to reduce my dependence on big tech companies and dislike Dropbox, but thank you so much for explaining.
I struggled with having too many bookmarks most of which I never even visited.
I solved it by creating a few text files to serve as an abyss for links. That way I know that a link is saved somewhere but it also doesn’t create a mess within my in-browser bookmarks.
I email them to myself.
Me too. Then they get buried until they’re no longer relevant.
I remember reading about somebody using Reddit as their “bookmarking tool” and posting it to their profile. You can kind of do the same on Lemmy.
endless tabs.
I use raindrop primarily as a cross platform bookmarker and personal archiver, as the paid plan saves backups of web pages. Just save + add tags for anything I read and may want to refer to later. Tags + free text search makes finding things easy. I don’t worry about folders/collections because the goal is speed.
Raindrop only archives public sites like a crawler though, so it often fails due to captchas or paywalls.
I also use the SingleFile browser extension and screenshots to archive amything I’m logged into locally. Recoll indexes them for easy searching.
I’ve been planning to test out ArchiveBox but the current approach works well enough.
Hi, just to clarify: If you want to save something that’s behind a paywall/captcha but you’re paying for it or have access to it, can you screenshot it and then move it into Raindrop? Or do you just have to use a separate bookmarker/archiver for that stuff?
You could screenshot or SingleFile it and save it in raindrop manually, but I wouldn’t do that for PII-related records. I use SingleFile to save interactions with businesses, account snapshots, and other things that would get lost in the ether, but I would never upload those anywhere without client side encryption.
SingleFile can be configured to save directly to ArchiveBox and other backends. Recoll has its own browser extension that can index everything you search locally.
They all have tradeoffs. That’s why ArchiveBox has several methods for archiving. Screenshots are a 1:1 visual copy but have size limits, and are an expensive way to archive without heavy compression. SingleFile does not work sometimes (ebay listings), or are huge with poorly optimised or image heavy sites, but issues can often be fixed in tweaking settings. Some formats are hard to read on mobile, or harder to index, etc. If someone who works at a computer used Recoll, I suspect the index would get very large, very fast, but it would certainly be useful for a focused research/work/study browser archive.
Ok, OK. Thank you so much for taking the time to explain all of this! Sounds like you really do need to have multiple tools working together. I might try Raindrop/Recoll/SingleFile for something.
I’m trying to use Anytype for storing actual info I want to save. I use too many windows and millions of tabs for stuff I want to read sooner, but never get to.
Anytype looks interesting. I like that it doesn’t need wifi for access and appears to be privacy/security focused (although I really need to learn more about how things like no server/peer-to-peer sync work). Do you find that you need a paid plan for personal use or is the free version enough?
Right now I have a good amount of things in there and I haven’t had any problems and I think I have plenty of room left on the free plan. I usually don’t add any files or images just in case. It seems pretty compact.
You could always use folders and whatnot to organize your bookmarks.
But a more fun way might be to make a website and put them into a links section. That way it could be potentially useful for others
