This is an interesting perhaps meta-relevant topic for HN.
How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere?
How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory?
I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades.
I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxonomy, to a repository with full text search and spaced repetition reminder cards, the things I remember are those that I took the time to read.
I suspect most people here has a comparable metric to share.
> How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory?
I do all the time. Behold.
I don't have a particular refined process or taxonomy. Just Pinboard and tags.
One tool I use to keep things circulating is a daily script that emails me 5 random bookmarks from my Pinboard account each morning. Stole the idea from this HN post:
I've been fighting my ~3000 (~70% untagged) bookmarks for a while.
Right now, I've gave up on silly tags like "Postgres" or "Python".
Currently, I'm trying to adapt the bookmark concept into different uses cases. The main one is sessions, but I have a few others niche ones, like "read later" and "a tool a day".
Honestly, my takeaway from managing my bookmarks, is that, snapshotting a session, is the closest thing I have to a "hot" start. I instantly recognize what I was working on and I remember why I opened/kept open those tabs.
I used to meticulously sort and tag individual bookmarks but rarely review them. Storing sessions and other "playlists" of bookmarks puts them in a form that I actually return to.
Plus this method takes far less time and effort than tagging and bagging pages according to an ever-expanding set of custom taxonomies.
I'm sure others have been using bookmarks this way for a while but it felt like a revelation to me :)
I have a couple thousand bookmarks in Google Bookmarks, all meticulously tagged to aid categorisation. A while ago, I came to the realisation that I never ever actually went back and referred to any them. I no longer accumulate these bookmarks but I still regard them fondly, like a well-organised bookshelf of reference material that I enjoy keeping around without ever planning to use.
I have an idea for a todo list app that will basically fade your todo items away and delete them after a month if you don't do them. It's half app, half art project about the lies we tell ourselves that we'll complete our todos "some other time" just so we don't feel like slackers.
I don't think I've ever went back to look at any of my offline bookmarks I've been collecting over 10 years. I have this fantasy that one day we'll have electricity but no internet for a while and I'll be glad I saved all of my bookmarks for offline use. But it's really just a fantasy.
Frankly, I've realized offline bookmarking just feels good and lets me close the tab. I would wager this is most people even if they don't yet realize it.
If people's public bookmarks aren't available online, I'd encourage you to publicly post them somewhere. Even if they aren't useful to you anymore, they are good signal for good content, which I think is worth trying to preserve for future use.
I just... copy the links and paste them into Google Keep :D
Really fast and searchable, I usually find myself searching for the same shit after a while, so Keep is another destination.
But now I realized I may want to back them up somewhere... technically these notes aren't important and can be lost, but I'd like to keep them
How many of us bookmark or otherwise record interesting posts from here and elsewhere?
How many of us ever refer that accumulated digital memory?
I have about 7,000 links with notes accumulated over the last few decades.
I’ve read a lot of them, but the hard to acknowledge reality is that even with a refined workflow, recording my links in a near perfect taxonomy, to a repository with full text search and spaced repetition reminder cards, the things I remember are those that I took the time to read.
I suspect most people here has a comparable metric to share.
Maybe the best bookmark repository is nul: