Ask HN: Do you bookmark or collect content?

I have finally found a workflow that works for me, and I'm slowly converting my thousands of unusable bookmarks (I'm a hoarder).

I use pinboard (delicio.us clone) and firefox.

pinboard lets you tag a bookmark, and you can subscribe to a tag's rss feed, or a combination of tags' feed. It's pretty clever.

firefox has a "live bookmark" feature, where a bookmark is really an rss reader of a specific feed. Peanut butter in my chocolate.

So for news sites, I tag them in pinboard as 'news'. For news sites that I want to read daily, they get an additional 'daily' tag. For news sites that I read frequently but not daily, they get the addtional 'often' tag. That's all in pinboard. I use a firefox extension to save pinboard bookmarks.

In firefox I have a bookmarks folder called news. Inside the news bookmark folder I have three live bookmarks, each pointing to one of my pinboard rss feeds:

  news #firefox folder
    news # firefox live bookmark pointing to pinboard 'news' rss feed
    news daily # pinboard feed for combo of 'news' and 'daily' tags
    news often # combo of 'news' and 'often' tags

In firefox I click on Bookmarks/news/news often, and I see the list of all pinboard bookmarks that have been tagged with both 'news' and 'often'.

And since it's pinboard I can access them from anywhere, any browser, no synchronization required.

Now I actually use my bookmarks.

Yes, I do, in my browser bookmarks... but I never come back. I just hoard bookmarks and then sweep and prune whole folders from time to time.

The amount of information I'm interested in is such that the time needed to understand it is >>>> my lifetime.

Unfortunately a tool won't help.

In recent years, I have preferred "read it later" services to traditional bookmarks. I delete items once I've read them (rather than building up an archive), and have went from Instapaper to Pocket to Apple's Reading List, each of which was an upgrade in UX.

That leaves traditional bookmarks mainly for select "reference" resources like API documentation.

For whatever reason, I have a strong dislike of "junk drawers", even when they are digital, and like getting rid of things.

Yes got loads of bookmarks, use Chrome because of the sync facility. Can add/remove bookmarks & they're synced between mobile devices & laptops.

I've always thought it would be nice to have bookmarks that either self destruct or pop-up as a reminder some specified time in the future. For example, I just read an article about creating a bootable USB copy of OS X Mavericks. I bookmarked it as a reminder for when Mavericks comes out. That's a bookmark I'm going to need exactly once in the future and that should be destroyed as soon as I act on it.

Yes I do. I use Kippt. They even have a google chrome extension.

Here's one thing I hate about bookmarks. They aren't. Bookmarks. They don't keep your place in the middle of a long work. They only, and always, point to the beginning of a work, not inside it, unless the author has made internal anchors and exposes them.

I'd like bookmarks to be bookmarks.

I'd also like bookmarks to keep track of what they have pointed to. So a bookmark might show you that it has pointed to paragraphs 10, 22, 39, and the current 44. Cause it'd be nice to be able to go back to paragraph 22 as a reference.

And a bookmark should have notes. Firefox bookmarks have properties/notes accessible on right-click; I imagine clever people could expand that.

Heck, why not make them queryable by sql?

I have over 2000 bookmarks. Simply organized by folder on my chrome browser.

There are a few solid good bookmarking apps but they all for the most part lack the option to import bookmarks/ also don't really have clean usable UX. The ones I am talking about are mostly for making bookmarks a social thing like pinterest

some of them are part of my Freeware Index project

https://github.com/Doubtme/FreeWare_Index

The rest are for my website index which has 17 main categories and 40+ sub categories spread out. I haven't made the website index public yet but I intend to once I organize it. I will probably end up deleting a few hundred links once I get to it

I don't bookmark in browser because I use lots of devices and don't want to be tied to one browser. If I find something I want to read, on whatever device, I send it to Pocket. If I want to keep it longterm, I star it and IFTTT sends it to an Evernote notebook for me. It works great for me, and if you want to know the one feature that would stop me ever swapping Pocket for your service, it'd be if you lacked IFTTT integration.

So really, I see the read-it-later service as the logical, device-agnostic development of bookmarks. That's not to say they can't be improved, but I don't have a suggestion offhand that hasn't been posted yet.

I store my bookmarks under revision control, as a single HTML file. The file has some jQuery magic to allow tagging and filtering, and there's an online demo linked to from the repository:

https://github.com/skx/bookmarks.public/

(I have my own bookmarks in a private repository. Which allows me to sync to N-machines.)

Chrome: well-known provider and is available without third-party installations. The latter will either fail or be acquired and shut down anyway.

I use Chrome and pin the tabs I definitely dont want to lose but I cant read right now. They stay there forever and dont take space. If they start piling up and do take space, I am forced to take out some and keep the really useful ones. Those that survive this iterative process for a long time go into the bookmarks.