At some point around when browsers started getting tabs, I stopped using bookmarks. I’m not really sure why, I don’t think it was a concious decision, but it’s a fact that I rarely reach for the “bookmark this link” button even though it’s sitting right there next to the URL entry box. I use tabs kind of like a short term memory… I keep stuff open while it’s important, and from time to time I cull out the stuff that I no longer care about.
This is somewhat at odds with my desire to have as few open tabs as possible at any given time, but I guess that’s life. Everything is about trade offs.
Earlier this year, someone shared a link to karakeep (née Hoarder). It’s a “Bookmark Everything” app with a few features that I found compelling:
- It saves a copy of the page you bookmark so you’ll always have it
- You can host it yourself
- It’s open source
- It allows you to highlight and take notes on anything you’ve bookmarked
- It will auto-tag the bookmarks you save
- Search works really well
This also happened to be right around when Mozilla announced it was shutting down pocket. I didn’t use pocket a ton, but I did find it useful for saving those “to-read” web pages that I wasn’t really going to read, but wanted to believe that I might. Karakeep, fit well into that space so I set it up and have been using it ever since.
No complaints as of now, I was able to import all the bookmarks I did have, as well as my pocket saves. I’m up to 942 saved bookmarks and it makes closing a tab much easier, as I can lie to myself that if I save it in karakeep, I’ll get to it later.
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