I visit a lot of sites. It often feels hard not to as someone who tends to be online more than he should be. One of the things I've realized is that I'm struggling to keep a repository of all the sites I visit that I want to bookmark for later review.

Back in the day I was a user of del.icio.us. I could keep and bookmark anything I found that I thought was interesting or something I wanted to come back to. It eventually died out and I haven't really had anything quite like it since.

Read Later Apps

The closest thing I had to it was probably my read-it-later services. Pocket back in the day, Instapaper for a while, and now Readwise. The problem with that as a bookmarking service is it's not really what they are. They're really just a "todo" list for articles I want to read. Just because I want to read an article or that I end up reading an article, doesn't mean I want to save it as a bookmark.

Raindrop

Raindrop showed some promise, but the one thing it seems to lack is the ability to do deep searching. It did have the organization system and the ability to clip from the browser which was helpful. One issue though was that if the source website disappears or the URL changes, the saved item is pretty much worthless. If left with nothing else, it'd probably suffice, but it doesn't completely fill the need or the goals I'm looking for.

Obsidian (My Current Solution)

I've been an Obsidian user for awhile now. It's a fantastic notes app that is simple, yet provides the extensibility to be more powerful. Notes are in markdown and it works out of "vaults" which are just folders on your computer. That's great because you own the files and can easily pick up and move them should you opt to change services. You don't have to worry about exporting your data from some third party service or anything. Just open up your file explorer, navigate to the folder, and boom, there are all your notes.

I've started a new bookmarking system through Obsidian and its web clipper. If there's ever a site I want to bookmark or save, I can clip it into Obsidian. This grabs all the text content as well. The clippings get thrown into their own folder in Obsidian and every Sunday, I have a task to remind me to go through the clippings folder, apply the front matter to the markdown and put it into my bookmarks folder which is organized into subfolders based on what the page's content is.

I try to keep the front matter standardized for each bookmark. I store:

markdown front matter showing what I collect from pages

  • The title of the article
  • The date the article was published
  • The date I clipped it
  • It's URL
  • The author
  • A list of tags

First and foremost, I want to know where the bookmark came from. Attribution and the source are important. I'm not trying to steal someone's hard work or writing, I want to know who I learned whatever from, or who's responsible for the tool, or whatever it is. I also want to be able to go back to the original source assuming that it's still online.

The additional bonus is that the clipper grabs the content from the page as well. This means that even if the page I'm clipping goes down, even if the author unfortunately decides to call it quits, I have the content. And I know that sounds like I'm trying to steal it or something, but I'm really just trying to help build a library of knowledge for myself...and literally, only for myself. (No I'm not feeding this to LLMs or AI, I'm just looking for a searchable index).

And just like Obsidian as a whole, it's all tied nicely to simple markdown files in a folder on my computer which means I'm not tied to a service. It was one of the strikes going against Raindrop. I don't know if and how easy it would be to pull the data out of Raindrop should they enshittify or if I found a better solution. With Obsidian, they're just text files. They can be backed up to the cloud or moved elsewhere with minimal effort.

So Why Do I Want This?

So much of this comes down to the fact that I'm always thinking of new side projects or new things to add to my site. Some of it comes down to me finding tutorials on how to do something with CSS or whatnot. Many times I'm just not ready to build whatever it is, but sometimes it's often just something I think is cool and could prove useful for a future project or feature. I don't want to forget about it, so I want to be sure to save it.

My browser bookmarks were becoming overloaded, and they didn't exactly provide the best searchability. I could really only save the title, which while not nothing, leave me wanting more.

So right now, this is my solution. Obsidian's web clipper pulls the content into my vault and I weekly move them into specific folders with tags. This will allow me to go through them and group them by tag and author, and do a full text search to find whatever I'm looking for.

I'm certainly open to alternative solutions if anyone has a way they do it that works. I just do like the thought of me controlling the content rather than a third party solution that could end up ruining things either because of their policies or because they go under...or any other reason.

Like with my notes, it's nice to control the content.