Saving Links

Harrison Malone
Aug 23, 2017 · 5 min read

Since I got a personal laptop in my first year of university (2011) I’ve bookmarked. It was a crappy Acer (I can’t even remember the model name) and I used an early iteration of Google Chrome. For a long time I used Chrome’s built in bookmarking system for saving urls. It worked okay. It was super fast to bookmark anything new and I could store things in folders. I also semi liked the bookmark manager because of its simplicity. As time went on my bookmarks got more and more disorganised and I became concerned with privacy and the way Google monetises your data.

I then got a Macbook Air (13 inch early 2014) for Christmas and started using Google Inbox around the time I received it. Google Inbox allows you to save or snooze links directly to your inbox which was quite handy. It was a good “read later” method as I spend a lot of time using the app. But obviously organisation, storage and privacy is still a problem. The same applied to Slack. I had a private Slack page when it started getting buzz as I was interested to see how it worked. I would save any new links to my Slack personal chat and this became my bookmarking method. This presented big problems with organisation and I found myself forgetting about links I’d saved a month ago. There were many “dead links” littering my Slack channel and it just wasn’t a good organisation method.

Searching for a solution

A couple of weeks ago I bought an iPad Pro. Now this has completely revolutionized what browser I use as I’ve almost completely made the switch to Safari. Don’t get me wrong, Chrome works great on an iPad but I wanted to try something different. I wanted to give Safari a go because I know that it has improved a lot. And I know that Apple really gives a shit about your security and privacy.

I do use Safari bookmarks but only for my most important, highly used websites. Things like hckr news, Medium top stories, Pitchfork best new music, The Verge and Product Hunt. These come up straight away when I’m browsing the internet, reminding me to read interesting stories and stay up to date with tech news. I like this workflow and UX a lot.

However, Safari bookmarks has the same limitations as Google Chrome bookmarks in that organisation is not good. For archiving links (like bookmarking a monitor you want to buy some time down the track) it is not a good method. I don’t want something that I’m going to buy in 4 months appearing every time I jump on Safari. I want it to be organised neatly away, somewhere that is easily accessible and private.

I then realised that having a link on Safari to where all my bookmarks are stored on a separate website would be a good workflow. I searched up good bookmarking websites and came across bookmarks.google.com which is actually Google’s old bookmarking system, that well and truly predates Chrome. It works fine and I used it for about a week. But again I’m giving up privacy and data to Google, as well as having to deal with a shitty UI that hasn’t been updated in 10 years.

So I did the search for good bookmarking websites again and really went a lot deeper into the results this time. I searched around and too be honest it’s a lot harder to find a good solution than you think. There isn’t one amazing obvious bookmarking software. I came across this Ask Product Hunt post which helped a bit. I was intrigued by raindrop.io based on feedback from the ask post and gave it a go. I uploaded my .html file and boom all my bookmarks were in Raindrop. I fiddled around for a bit but it just didn’t feel easy or comfortable. The UI works great but I think it over complicates things. It also didn’t have a simple list display where all I want is the list and the full description (or note) about the link. It wasn’t for me.

At this point I was getting frustrated. I was thinking to myself how the fuck does it take you this long to work out a bookmarking solution. I guess I’m a little bit of a perfectionist with these things where I’ll overthink it. But then again I like the process and the search for finding software.

I wrote down what I’m looking for as a bookmarking solution. Basically, I wanted a simple UI with a full description of the link. I like writing about why I’m bookmarking the link as when you come back to it you aren’t confused by why it’s there. I also wanted it to be workable on any browser. I didn’t really care about it working on mobile so long as it functioned on my iPad (I can use Google Inbox in cases where I need to save links on my iPhone). I thought a little more… there was something charming about bookmarks.google.com despite it being shitty UI and giving up privacy. I liked how simple it was and how I could access it from my Safari bookmarks. The workflow was good, just a couple of things sucked.

After again consulting the Ask Product Hunt post and looking at a few more forums I came across Pinboard. This seemed to do exactly what I wanted. It’s simple, private and displays the full note next to your bookmark. There’s no fluff, it’s just a list of bookmarks and you can store them in folders. Unfortunately, Pinboard works like shit on iPhone but that’s okay because it wasn’t part of my criteria. It is usable on an iPad and perfect on a desktop so that’s all I need. It has the perfect balance of simplicity and privacy that I’m after. The other downside is that it’s $11 per year but I don’t mind paying for software that is super important. Especially to prevent your data from being used nefariously or from being served ads constantly.

So I’m going in for the long haul with Pinboard now that I’ve coughed up dough. I believe that simple and fast software is better than bloated and complicated, so this is right for me.

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Harrison Malone

Written by

teacher @CoderAcademy_au and runner

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