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.
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.
Logseq for texts and links I want to archive and refer back to, Wallabag for articles and other texts I want to read later.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
endless tabs.
I email myself the link/s.
Bookmarking this, some very helpful answers here.
I have a big mess of bookmarks sorted into different folders with titles that describe more of an emotion then any sort of description of what’s in it.
I started using Zotero for exactly this. Keeps copies of pages, and let’s me search in the text (of everything I keep in there, which also includes books)
Zotero looks nice. It looks like you can choose to sync data across devices. Do you know if you choose to sync some things but not everything, or is just an on/off thing where you either sync everything or nothing? Thanks!
I don’t use sync so I can’t tell you.
Oh, OK. Do you know if you can add notes about links/articles that are more in-depth than just short tags?
You can add notes, and tags, and annotations to highlighted text (within the built-in reader)
And if you feel that the notes are lacking in some way, you can add any kind of document to an item
Awesome, thank you so much!
Sort your open tabs in tab groups
A long time ago I started using OneNote, which was great for many things including simply saving either a snippet of a page as an image or copy/paste the portion I wanted to save - it also included the URL of the page.
This had the benefit of making it searchable.
Today I’d recommend starting with something like Joplin or one of it’s competitors. I’m partial to Joplin for how it stores data (essentially files in a folder so it’s easy to copy/sync) and it’s cross-platform capability.
OneNote is stil my favorite note taking tool prior to putting something in a more permanent database. It is so easy to sync with coworkers and you can paste just about anything into it from another microsoft products keeps life simple. As long as sinpletons arent dumping screen shots into it then life is simple to convey thoughts / research.
I’m so stuck in OneNote - I’ve been using it since 2010.
I’d like to move to Joplin for cross platform use, but that’s a lot of stuff to move.
I use instapaper. It’s an app and an extension.
Might actually swap to Wallabag soon though
Thanks for sharing these!
