January 23, 2024
Hello, and welcome to the first dedicated post on this microblog.
After seeing what Neonaut did, I decided I wanted to start doing this myself.
I am a bookmark power user. That's funny to say, because I don't actually use bookmarks that much. I have address bar URL suggestions disabled, except for ones in my bookmarks. That is basically what bookmarks are to me, shortcuts that appear in the address bar.
I have tons of bookmarks from many, many years, and the organization for them is terrible. Every time I have to use the folder selector, I get stressed out. But I have too many bookmarks to suddenly switch to a tag based system, and I like how folders work, especially with speed dial and thumbnails. Look at this sick new tab page animation I made with them:
I have many duplicate bookmarks. Searching for basic things will often return the same thing multiple times. Part of this is because I think some bookmarks deserve more than one place (the benefits of a tagging system), but mainly because every year 3rd-8th grade, all my bookmarks would duplicate.
On top of that, I have a lot of glunk in my bookmarks: things I made just for fun. On my main browser, I've actually managed to cut down on most of these. For example, here are 35 folders nested inside each other:
That folder is repeated about 7 times throughout my bookmarks. If you think that's bad, here's a password based bookmark system:
Thankfully, this one is only there once. I don't even know why I made some of these. Here's a folder with the PBS Kids website 140 times.
I don't want to delete these all, because that would be deleting apart of me. At the same time, I don't want to deal with going through all my bookmarks and removing duplicates, because that would take way too long, and I hate boring tedious tasks. Instead, I let these old bookmarks rot away in a archive folder, and I instead mainly use my top level bookmark folders.
This works great for the most part, except not every website has a clearly defined folder, or one site could fit into multiple folders. The sites that have no clear folder to fit into just go to a throwaway page:
Later, folders do exist that could house these bookmarks, but I've long forgotten about them by that point.
I tried organizing my bookmarks using Raindrop.io, but that didn't work. I liked how it removd my duplicate bookmarks. However, I found that I never used it. The problem is that the interface isn't compact enough, and I like having tight integration with what I actually use. Having to manually put stuff into this app/website just doesn't work for me. Also, I have so many bookmarks that they just started to fail to import them all.
What I needed was a way to not organize bookmarks by category, but instead by pages linking to them. This doesn't make much sense, but in my mind, it works quite well. At first, I tried this system using Obsidian. It made sense because it has a graph view. This didn't work well, as Obsidian isn't really made for bookmarks. You can't actually tell what is what on the graph. It works great for my school notes (pictured below), but not bookmarks.
Next, I decided to try Anytype, which is what I'm using today. Not everything in it is a link, which lets me link topics, which is nice. I mainly use it for pages I want to remember, and for keeping track of research. Notion wishes it could. They also recently added support for sharing links to the app from the mobile app, which is implemented in a clunky way, but it works.
The main reason why I settled on this was because the graph actually showed icons. Look at this mess of my very own:
I don't like the graph that much, because when you start linking enough topics, the icons become really spread out. Also, adding more bookmarks is a little clunky. You have to right click an existing bookmark on a page, and then hit open as page, then type "/bookmark", and then you can add one. It's not perfect, but this is what works the best for me currently.
Instead of just dumping every single bookmark I had into here, I instead just add things currently of interest, and then connect topics and pages together. I wish it was more automated, but it's whatever. I also like being able to make a page called something like "you will wanna look at this eventually" and then dumping some links.
The main thing I wish was different was I wish the software was better. The battery usage is kinda insane, and there's a bug where I have to reinstall it everytime I want to open it on my computer.