Show HN: Free Plain-Text Bookmarking(webtag.io)

172 pointsby vasanthvvor 2 Jahren75 comments

https://webtag.io

92 comments

piterrrovor 2 Jahren

Yeeeears ago (around 2011/2012) I've built a simple bookmarking app called Miitla (MInd IT LAter), you can still find references to it[1]. I was focused on providing a simple bookmarking experience with tags and such. Unfortunately, I was not motivated enough to keep updating the project and in the end, I stopped. I got a few thousand users, but at the time my day job was generating nice income and I wasn't thinking about monetizing Miitla.

To this day, I regret that I did not pursue it and transformed into something bigger.

Congrats on the launch, what catches my attention is the simplicity. Keep it like this for long enough and you will get many users.

[1]http://ratemystartup.com/save-links-with-one-click-miitla-co...

piterrrovor 2 Jahren

Here is an interesting plot twist. At the time, one of Miitla "competitors" was Kippt[1], I was impressed with their design at the time and followed them very carefully. Turns out, Kippt founder is Linear founder these days...

Persistence is the key.

[1]https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/kippt

idlewordsvor 2 Jahren

I agree persistence is key! Oddly though the kippt homepage doesn't seem to load for me.

piterrrovor 2 Jahren

It has been discontinued given that Coinbase acqui-hired the Kippt team (2 people)

justusthanevor 2 Jahren

Two thoughts:

- I like the no-nonsense landing page, but what I'd like more is to be able to see what the product actually looks like without having to sign up. At least screenshots, but a demo would be nice.

- I'm looking to migrate away from Pinboard, but I like how you can see all of a user's bookmarks (e.g: https://pinboard.in/u:justusthane) unless they mark them private. I get that the point of Webtag is it's private by default, but it would also be cool if this was an option.

egonschielevor 2 Jahren

Just curious, why are you planning to migrate away from Pinboard? I have been meaning to sign up for years.

justusthanevor 2 Jahren

I've been been a Pinboard fan for years. I paid $11 for lifetime access back in 2011, and "upgraded" to an annual plan with archival in 2021 (mostly because I wanted to support the continued development of Pinboard, and that the time Marciej mentioned new features that were supposedly coming). I love Maciej's work, writing[0], and general vibe. Pinboard acquiring del.icio.us[1] after Yahoo drove it into the ground is one of the most delicious (pardon the pun) acquisition stories in tech history I think. I also enjoyed his micro-incubator thing[2] (I think he was giving grants of $50 or something).

Unfortunately over the past several years it just feels like he's gotten burnt out on Pinboard and has stopped developing and is barely supporting it. I guess that's fine if everything works properly, but I don't really have a lot of confidence in the future of Pinboard anymore. I personally haven't had any actual problems with Pinboard yet, but have read several accounts by others who have and have found support poor to non-existent.

[0]: https://idlewords.com/

[1]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2017/06/pinboard_acquires_delicious...

[2]: https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/01/pinboard_co_prosperity_winn...

martttvor 2 Jahren

Have you also considered Linkhut as an alternative? [1] I like it a lot, but I'm addicted to Pinboard's autocompletion of tags, so I haven't made an ultimate switch (I'm also with Pinboard since ~2010-2011).

Would be great, indeed, to see a working instance of Webtag.

1: https://ln.ht

justusthanevor 2 Jahren

I’ll check it out, thanks! Ideally I’m looking for something that’s self-hosted and also supports archival, but maybe that’s too much to ask.

landharvor 2 Jahren

Curious, what do you mean by “autocompletion of tags”?

martttvor 2 Jahren

Just the typical thing: while adding a bookmark, when I start typing in the first letters of a tag (e.g. "hack" for "hackernews"), Pinboard is offering a drop-down menu with possible matches. Linkhut didn't have this last time I checked. It is maybe not a big issue, though -- possibly, relying on your own memory (not programmatically offered suggestions), your tagcloud may get less messy over time; you'll end up with a smaller amount of tags, which may be a good thing at times.

I think I like 'em both, Pinboard and Linkhut, though.

asdefghykvor 2 Jahren

I plan on leaving. I am unable to download all copies of ny bookmarks from my archival account. Have sent support request about this never any response. Support requests are often not answered. Google around , you will see plenty of other complaints in my opinion.

blangkvor 2 Jahren

Pinboard is pretty great, especially with a perpetual accpubt

thinking_bananavor 2 Jahren

I'm curious, where and how is the information stored as part of the service. Would be nice if you can share the deployment strategy that is being used as it suggests the framework for long term support.

Thanks and nice work

glacialsvor 2 Jahren

I'm not the dev, but based on the source it looks like Mongo: https://github.com/vasanthv/webtag/blob/main/server/collecti...

tandavvor 2 Jahren

It would be nice to have some sort of demo

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

avinasshvor 2 Jahren

I love the homepage, simple and clean! Any screenshots of how it looks for logged users?

I noticed it uses MongoDB. That seems like an overkill to me, have you considered SQLite?

if you are open to taking feature requests:

- ability to add random notes

- any submitted link should be captured in archive / wayback machine

- (complicated) search within the submitted links content

codazodavor 2 Jahren

I didn’t try it but am surprised it’s using a DB. I thought it would be… plain-text.

account-5vor 2 Jahren

Sounds like you're after zotero.

herdstvor 2 Jahren

Why is MongoDB overkill?

zhuxxvor 2 Jahren

I have just built a bookmark service dedicated for Hacker News, which use you own Notion pages as database.

https://hn.toonmaterial.com

tzuryvor 2 Jahren

Good old https://del.icio.us/ … No longer exists.

jchookvor 2 Jahren

Nice, looks like you're off to a great start.

Here are some features I love about Pinboard.in that you could consider adding to Webtag as it grows:

- iOS/Android share extension, so I can easily bookmark anything from my mobile device. This is crucial for me as the friction is reduced enough that I will actually bookmark things and helps me keep everything in one place.

- Auto-complete tags, boy is this handy.

- Use AI to guess tags that I can easily add with a click. See this browser extension for an example: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pinboard-plus/mphdp...

- A description field that will auto-populate with my highlighted text or default to the site's metadata description. This helps a lot for finding things again without having to stuff a lot of text in an unwieldy title. In the search, I can vaguely describe what I'm looking for and often find it again.

- Semantic search. Pinboard doesn't have this but it could become the holy grail of bookmarking services by adding it. So often I have moments where I recall something I read years ago, but cannot remember the exact wording or how to find it again in a verbatim search function.

- Archival of bookmarks. Even merely automatically submitting the page to an archival site would suffice. The bookmark app I wrote uses a headless browser to save an MHTML file plus yt-dlp to fetch media, but it doesn't have the above features so I don't use it, ha.

- Server-side rendering. The little loading animation is just enough to make the site feel slow and almost defeats your goal of a dead-simple UI. Edit: Also I am seeing 600-700ms response times on the bookmarks endpoint.

For your homepage, I would recommend adjusting the wording on "Plain-text-based bookmarking. No fancy images or graphics." Coming from Pinboard, I was unsure what this meant exactly. At first I wondered if the service archived only the text of bookmarked pages like a "reader mode" feature, especially with the "no limits on storage" note. Also it's not literally plain-text in the typical sense (e.g. .txt files or plain-text accounting). It's just a clean UI. Maybe say "Simple text-only UI" or similar.

On the logged-in menu, I would change "Home" to "My Bookmarks" or similar.

It might be helpful to communicate to prospective users how you plan to fund the project long-term. When selecting a bookmarking service, reliability and longevity are going to be top factors. Free forever, no business plan, etc do not inspire that kind of confidence.

Overall, it's a great start. I wish you luck!

oneeyedpigeonvor 2 Jahren

When I try to sign up I just get "something went wrong please try again"

JMiaovor 2 Jahren

Getting “something went wrong please try again” on sign up page. Safari, iPadOS.

fraenckovor 2 Jahren

Small typo: The button on the bookmarklet page says "bookmarkelet".

huhtenbergvor 2 Jahren

All attempts to create an account fail with "429 Too Many Requests".

911evor 2 Jahren

No GDPR mentions, cannot delete account easily :-(

flanbiscuitvor 2 Jahren

For a long time I wanted to figure out a way to organize my "bookmarks" that I have scattered all over the place. I have many many favorited posts on HN, I used Reddit's "save" feature, I add videos to "watch later" or some other playlist in Youtube, etc etc. I thought maybe I could one day unify all this into one place where I can tag them so I know why I bookmarked them (I have definitely sifted through pages of my HN favorites trying to find something). At this point though, I have too much to go through that the task seems daunting. But now that we have AI, I have shifted my mindset to wanting to just feed everything to AI and just have a chat interface where I can ask it for what I want. I feel like that is the future of organization (at least for me it is). Ideally it would be something self-hosted

bsnnkvvor 2 Jahren

Your initial want is pretty close to I ended up creating for myself for all things text-based with https://notado.app. I ended up ditching my old stuff in Instapaper, Readwise and Pinboard back in 2020ish because it didn't really fit the data model[1] (content-first rather than link-first) and since then I'm very happy with how everything is archived[2], organized and shareable[3] in Notado.

I still think it's possible to go incredibly far with a good data model, fuzzy search, automated tagging and feed publishing.

[1]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/the-bookmarking-data-model-is-wr...

[2]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/notado-07-2023-update/

[3]: https://lgug2z.com/articles/using-rust-chrome-and-nixos-to-t...

mronetwovor 2 Jahren

Looks great. What's up with Kullish? Seems to be down

bsnnkvvor 2 Jahren

Naturally, the release I push before making a comment here is the one that takes down the website. Back up now :)

al_borlandvor 2 Jahren

What I never understand about the chat interfaces is how I'm supposed to browse? With something like bookmarks, I sometimes go through my old bookmarks and find interesting/useful things I forgot all about. If it's all in AI, behind a chatbot, and I forget about something, how do I know to ask for it?

hahajkvor 2 Jahren

Readwise has been really good for me to remind myself of highlights I made years ago. I set aside 30 minutes in the morning to go over a few highlights and write. I think that adding a "random bookmark" every day would be a good idea. Most of the time you say "huh, I forgot I had that" and forget it forever. But once in a while it comes at the perfect time. (Or a few days before/after the perfect time would still be nice)

flanbiscuitvor 2 Jahren

Yes, true. Maybe there's a happy medium where it can auto-tag/organize them for you but also provide the chat interface, giving you the choice to browser or ask. I don't want my links to just be ingested by AI and disappear. I think being able to see them somewhere as well is important.

hawskivor 2 Jahren

If I would ever be bothered enough to invest time in getting to know existing or making my own bookmarking system I would just like for it to cache the text from a thing I want to bookmark and offer a nice full text search over the whole archive. I think that, the HN's favorite, Pinboard has something like this.

I would think about going one step further and having a full text search over my whole browsing history with a way to penalize or remove certain hosts. Then I would love to augment my web searches to also include things from my archive.

I feel I would have a much bigger utility out of this in comparison to thing through AI, though I get it could be also beneficial. However AI, I believe, is costlier to run. A nice, properly indexed, full text search probably could run on a phone at least for a private archive.

jackthetabvor 2 Jahren

Same here. I'm saving my pennies to buy a decent machine to work on precisely that.

Valordvor 2 Jahren

What tools would you run provided hw was not an issue?

What specs do you think would be needed?

GGOvor 2 Jahren

I use linkding for that? Have you tried it? https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding

DandyDevvor 2 Jahren

Does linkding pull in your GitHub stars, Reddit saves etc? That’s what the parent wants to achieve. It seems linkding is just a regular bookmark tool.

Valordvor 2 Jahren

Is this possible with tooling available today?

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

jxyvor 2 Jahren

If you ever used w3m, it uses a local bookmark file. Something like this:

    $ cat ~/.w3m/bookmark.html
    <html><head><title>Bookmarks</title></head>
    <body>
    <h1>Bookmarks</h1>
    <h2>Searches</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="https://www.google.com/">Google</a>
    <!--End of section (do not delete this comment)-->
    </ul>
    <h2>Time Sink</h2>
    <ul>
    <li><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a>
    <!--End of section (do not delete this comment)-->
    </ul>
    </body>
    </html>

kbrosnanvor 2 Jahren

Looks like a variation of the Netscape bookmark format.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/...

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

hidelooktropicvor 2 Jahren

It's hard to understand from the description what this even is. Does it save your bookmarks in like a <ul> element? Is it clickable? What does it look like?

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

selmetwavor 2 Jahren

Really cool! I like that bookmarking seems to be making a comeback. I really like the low-tech approach. It would be cool if there was a social component to it as well.

I actually worked on a similar project centered around social bookmarking; https://huntergather.website/.

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

pwillia7vor 2 Jahren

I recently came up with a new way to bookmark with Logseq and Raindrop that I like a lot -- https://reticulated.net/posts/a-better-bookmark-experience-w...

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

severinevor 2 Jahren

I currently use Firefox bookmarks, synced through my Mozilla account. What would be the advantages for me if I were to use Webtag?

Related: does anyone know if there's any limit to synced bookmarks/history in Firefox?

hardwaresoftonvor 2 Jahren

Do you ever feel like Firefox is forgetting your bookmarks or search is bad?

Not endorsing this project or any other, but from time to time I’m a bit suspicious that firefox is dropping some links I’m sure I saved/not surfacing some links I’m fairly sure were related to my search.

Likely all in my head though!

metadatvor 2 Jahren

The search is bad.

Example: If you tag one entry with "meta" and another with "metaverse", then search bookmarks for "meta", you'll get the union of anything containing meta. Particularly problematic in the case of short terms like "ux", "go", or "c".

kbrosnanvor 2 Jahren

Use the search filters.

> Add ^ to show only matches in your browsing history.

> Add * to show only matches in your bookmarks.

> Add + to show only matches in bookmarks you've tagged.

> Add % to show only matches in your currently open tabs.

> Add # to show only matches where every search term is part of the title or part of a tag.

> Add $ to show only matches where every search term is part of the web address (URL). The text “https://xn--ivg or “http://xn--ivg in the URL is ignored, but not “file:///”.

> Add ? to show only search suggestions.

You can select the search constraint in the dropdown if you don't want to memorize the list.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet...

metadatvor 2 Jahren

I meant in the bookmark search, the search box which appears after pressing cmd/ctrl-b.

This is still an interesting workaround, I'll give a shot. Thanks!

anticodonvor 2 Jahren

No, I definitely feel that Firefox is forgetting some of my bookmarks. And the search is indeed awful.

I switched to buku and rofi-buku, which is more robust, convenient and accessible solution. And not tied to a single browser (I use several, for example, different browsers for leisure and for work).

carlosjobimvor 2 Jahren

Why should somebody try to convince you in either direction? I can't see how it would matter to any other person how you specifically choose to sync your bookmarks.

mapreducevor 2 Jahren

> Why should somebody try to convince you in either direction?

Because we are on a tech website and as good samaritans we want to help each other out by sharing the information, knowledge, projects, tools or recommendations we have?

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

renegat0x0vor 2 Jahren

I wrote bookmark manager in Django.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

You can self host it.

You can add RSS sources and auto import new links regularly.

It may not be stare of the art, but gets the job done.

Demo below, but may not be working when you look at it. It runs on raspberry pi.

https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/catalog/entry/11503/

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

TehShrikevor 2 Jahren

Sounds cool, but my bookmarks are too valuable to save on the servers of someone I'm not paying a subscription to :-x

vasanthvvor 2 Jahren

This is open-source, you can spin up your own instance.

quaintdevvor 2 Jahren

Wish this had docker image. I don't want to install npm to spin this up.

copper-floatvor 2 Jahren

Just spin up an alpine Linux image with node preinstalled. I got the server up and running in no time.

nickmonadvor 2 Jahren

Create one?

TehShrikevor 2 Jahren

I appreciate that, but I prefer pay someone else to keep the server up

ceritiumvor 2 Jahren

How much would you pay?

TehShrikevor 2 Jahren

I'm currently paying Raindrop.io 28$/year. I would easily pay 100$/year for a good bookmarking service that archives the pages that I bookmark (which Raindrop is doing well for me right now).

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

jrm4vor 2 Jahren

Hey folks, another option that I've settled on (after messing with shaarli, shiori and a few others) is Buku.

Usually I really like plain text instead of dbs, but the killer here for me, I realize, is that I'm not tied to any one method of input OR output. Mainly, I do adding through a bookmarklet, and retrieval through "bukuserver," a self-hosted web thing. But also, I have the option of the command line (for bulk adding) as well as browser addons and other things, and (I use Syncthing) it doesn't matter "where" the db is, either on my machine or hosted on a vps.

https://github.com/jarun/buku

burgerritovor 2 Jahren

Interesting:

- Shiori (栞) means bookmark in Japanese

- Buku means book in Indonesian

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

dsp_personvor 2 Jahren

> No limits on storage.

just need a BBD module (bookmark block device) and boom free unlimited disk backups

ks2048vor 2 Jahren

About to encode my photo library as a set of "data:image/jpeg;base64" URLs...

dsp_personvor 2 Jahren

ah, been done haha

Show HN: BookmarkFS – Store files as Chrome bookmarks that sync between devices

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32887863

apgwozvor 2 Jahren

I wrote a KV store on top of Bit.ly once: https://github.com/apg/bitdb -- The "todo list" example has a good description of what's going on: https://github.com/apg/bitdb/blob/master/examples/todo.py

And I know of a generic blob store on top of (older) Snapchat API: https://github.com/hausdorff/snapchat-fs

It's really fun to "exploit" APIs in this way to create alternative uses.

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

accrualvor 2 Jahren

I would like something like this but self-hosted. I have a collection of .html bookmark files from over the years and would love to consolidate them all into one place without having to sync them to Google/Microsoft/3rd party.

joshkavor 2 Jahren

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab...

accrualvor 2 Jahren

Thanks!

TehShrikevor 2 Jahren

Looks like the source code is all public, so self-hosted is probably an option: https://github.com/vasanthv/webtag

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

idlewordsvor 2 Jahren

"Free unlimited bookmarks. No limits on storage."

No way that could backfire.

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

darekkayvor 2 Jahren

I've also created an open-source plain-text bookmarking tool, Static Marks: https://darekkay.com/static-marks/

The bookmarks are stored in one or more YAML files, and static-marks generates a single web page on build.

[deleted]vor 2 Jahren

dmdvor 2 Jahren

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