bookmarks

  1. services

This page aims to document the various tools I (may) use or used to manage my ridiculously huge bookmark collection.

  1. Current alternatives
    1. Wallabag
    2. Zotero
  2. Possible alternatives
  3. The attic
    1. Browser bookmarks
    2. Delicious
    3. Delirious and Rubric
    4. Diigo
    5. SemanticScuttle
    6. Status.net
    7. Bookie

Current alternatives

Those are either just dead recently, or are still considered.

I'm currently using Wallabag to index my bookmarks and sync some articles to my ebook reader with Wallabako. I am using Zotero for an inventory of my physical book collection and calibre for my ebook collection.

Wallabag

Similar to Bookie, Wallbag (AKA "in the poche" or "poche") is more focused on "read it later" functionality. The user interface is slicker than Bookie, but otherwise functionalities seem similar. See the demo site for an example.

Wallabag supports read/unread status and favorites, and also remember your reading position in articles.

Downsides:

See also all the issues i commented on (and in the app).

Zotero

I'm using Zotero for my book collection, so I figured i could use it for my bookmarks as well. Unfortunately, i didn't want to store my bookmarks "in the cloud", and besides the plugin wouldn't work with cookies disabled (bug #15).

The Zotero dataserver was also too difficult to setup, and without a Debian package (Debian bug #709925).

Finally, Zotero is in an uncertain state because of the firefox XULocalypse, so I'm looking for replacements.

Update: I'm currently in the process of testing tellico. It's a KDE GUI project that has roughly the same feature set as Zotero as far as I'm concerned but it's packaged for Debian. It's kind of old and clickety, but it's still maintained (last release 9 days ago, 2022-01-02) and the package is up to date in Debian. Plus it does "lending management" which is something i had trouble with in Zotero. Of course, it will likely never replace Wallabag but I'm not sure I will ever do that anyways. A major downside compared with Zotero is that it doesn't automatically sync between different machines nor does it provide a web interface. I am hoping that syncthing can act as a replacement for the former. It should also be noted that I haven't tried adding new books, which works very well in Zotero, but maybe not as well in Tellico.

Possible alternatives

Possible alternatives to zotero and/or wallabag include:

This also overlaps with bookmarking software like:

... and archival software in the WARC ecosystem.

The attic

Those are looong gone.

Browser bookmarks

Before all of this web 2.0 bullshit, I was using carefully sorted and crafted folders to manage bookmarks in my web browser. Boy, how things changed (not).

Delicious

The original! I had a delicious account basically before it was sold to Yahoo) and the URL was del.icio.us (~2005).

Delicious still operates, after changing hands a few times.

Delirious and Rubric

I then tried various free software which i forgot the name that were trying to emulate Delicious. One of the interesting ideas back then was to translate the Folksonomy between different languages, something that no tool does yet.

Here's what I was saying about this, back in march 2006:

Ca serait ecoeurant:

Amazingly, Rubric is still around and somewhat alive, but the delirious service is now name-squatted, if i understand this correctly.

Diigo

I ended up on Diigo probably around 2010, which gave me the privilege of saving copies of the webpages. After they removed that privilege and the extension failed with javascript blocked, I stopped using Diigo completely and ended up with SemanticScuttle.

Diigo allowed posting bookmarks on Twitter, and I had made a patch to bridge it with Identica instead. It also allowed annotating web pages, which was a huge privacy issue because the Firefox extension would hit diigo.com for every page you would visit.

Diigo is still around.

SemanticScuttle

I used to run my own SemanticScuttle instance, but the bookmarklet wouldn't work if javascript was disabled on pages, at least with ScriptNo. SemanticScuttle wouldn't save copy of pages either, but supported private bookmarks (which I ended up not really using).

I made the Debian package when I started using it in 2011, and orphaned it in february 2014

This used to run on http://bm.orangeseeds.org, now closed.

Status.net

While using SemanticScuttle, I did a brief and feeble attempt at using the Status.net bookmark support, which completely failed basically because I couldn't import my already huge bookmark collection.

Bookie

Then I discovered Bookie, installed by a friend on https://lib3.net/bookie. It is pretty impressive: it keeps snapshots of pages and imported my whole bookmark collection really fast. Bookie is written in Python.

The downsides?

Update: bookie kind of died. The upstream project is dead and the main hosting service shutdown. My friend converted his instance to Wallabag.

Created . Edited .