My advice, drop raindrop before it drops your bookmarks.
My biggest issue up front was how slow and somewhat clunk it felt. For something that manages bookmarks, it needs to be fast an unobtrusive. It shouldn't feel like a chore to create a bookmark.
Maybe I was using it wrong.
In any case, I'm glad I'm ending the experiment early.
I truly hope they can sort these issues out.
If you otherwise liked it, it might be worth taking a second look.
I feel that this is the problem with any bookmark manager, as they are going to be an extension, and you can't drag'n'drop to your navbar, or even see the bookmarks there.
On the other hand, I think their web-clipper (both extension and bookmarklet) works very well, considering you have more (optional) information to input, like the tags.
If I compare creating a chrome bookmark vs raindrop, without adding tags, just folder, I have the same number of clicks. So I'm not aware how they would make it feel less of a chore
F
It really comes down to UX. The browser integration is fantastic, and there's a really smooth native-feel Electron app that has an integrated browser.
One of my favourite uses is creating a temporary "project-oriented" collection. For example, let's say I'm researching places to travel. I can create a collection about this, bookmark things (destinations, discussion threads, Wikipedia entries, etc.) as I go along, and then use the built-in browser to go back and forth between each bookmark as I make notes or whatever. Normally you'd use browser tabs for this, except the Raindrop way means I'm not consuming lots of browser resources, and the collection stays persistent even if I close it.
The same workflow works for tech projects I work on (where I may want some documentation, papers, etc. "scrapbooked" in a temporary place), and many other things.
Safari is the only browser (that I know) that has a similar kind of bookmark-oriented browsing functionality, and it's just not very good.
Overall it's much nicer than the older services such as Delicious and Pinboard, not to mention the atrocious built-in bookmarking features in modern browsers, which have been ossifying since around 1998.
You are expecting too much. It's a commercial venture. There is no reason to open source servers.
Originally on HN, six years ago. Still my most upvoted comment.
Raindrop certainly looks better, but Pinboard seems to have better integrations across other services. Those permanent archives are nice to have, but it does not feel that permanent without a local copy and a perceived bus-factor of 1 on both of them.
I requested an Archive Backup in my Pinboard settings, but I am still waiting for a download link three weeks later.
Thankfully, those bookmarks.html exports and imports seem to be very reliable across different bookmarking services.
But it's run by one guy, in another country. No thanks.
I wish there were a bookmark manager like this that didn't require the *aaS aspect.
Extensions page has (and since a long time)
- a dead Firefox add-on url
- a long abandoned Safari extension (Safari 5)
- I have never tried Chrome extension and the link is not yet dead so I assume it might still be working.
Oh yeah, there are some bookmarklets.
I think I will move mine to something self-hosted with browser add-on support for Safari and Firefox, at leat Firefox.
I figured at the worst, import/prune/export back to my bookmark bar.
Exporting and syncing isn't a feature and won't be a feature, so uninstalled. Glad that part worked fast.
I miss Xmarks.
1. Needs more blockchain for versioning/authenticity
2. Needs additional knowledge management beyond collections and tags
Are you serious about this?
why not just git versioning? what does blockchain offer over any other versioning system that doesn't require a ton of useless math solving?
Penny for your thoughts.