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Adrian Matei
Adrian Matei

Posted on • Updated on

How I manage my dev bookmarks to save time and nerves

If you are like me and you like to keep things neat and organised, you probably end up with a dozen of folders and sub-folders in your bookmarks navigation bar. The reality is this only scales up to a certain point and then you just add your latest bookmarks in a temp, to do or the "corporate" folder. But we do know these also grow big and unmanageable pretty quickly. And how about the source code links for the articles or the dates when they were published?

Because of that I decided to take the matter in my own hands and programmed a tool to help me manage my dev bookmarks which is now live at www.codever.dev. Instead of folders with sub-folders with sub-folders I make now extensive use of tags, have the source code easily accessible beside the link and know when it was published. Of course it requires some discipline from my part, but I know now for sure it is worth it in the long rung.

Amongst the things I use the most and programmed are

Save bookmarks

I've made it easy to save bookmarks:

  • The first option is with the help of bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are little javascript links that live in the bookmarks toolbar of your browser. Drag one the bookmarklets to your browser toolbar

  • Use the Codever chrome extension for Chromium based browsers

    With both methods you can select the text on page that you want to be added to the description of the bookmark before you click the bookmarklet's link

  • Use the Add New Bookmark from the website

See how to automagically bookmark the youtube videos :

Save bookmark to Codever chrome extension usage


Bookmarking code snippets

You have also the possibility to bookmark code snippets from the web via the chrome extension or bookmarklet, or from IntelliJ:

Save snippet via extension


Custom Search

You have the possibility to save a search and it will appear in autocompletion sorted by last used:

How to search on Codever.dev chrome extension usage

The search at the end of the demo is configured in AlfredApp with a custom query - https://www.codever.dev/search?q={query}&sd=my-bookmarks

Pinned

This is where I place the bookmarks I currently use a lot.

Read Later

It happens that I stumble over a really good article or video, but don't have the time to go over it at that moment. No problem, I add it to Read Later. I am a good citizen and after I read or watch it, I make it public if it's worth sharing.

Copy to mine

If you find a public bookmark that you feel like it belongs to your bookmarks you can use the Copy to mine function so that the bookmark will be saved as private in the list of your bookmarks and you can recall it even if the user that published deletes her.

By using these features not only I save a lot of time, around a work week a year as gross stated int How I save a workweek a year by efficiently managing my dev bookmarks, but also lots of nerves and search frustrations.

Take it for a spin and I promise you won't be able to live without it, especially when at the office. I'd love to hear your thoughts and improve suggestions in the comments below or on Github - the project itself is open source

Public Bookmarks

Oh, forgot to mention - worthy public bookmarks are published regularly on Github at https://github.com/CodeverDotDev/bookmarks.

Top comments (2)

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v6 profile image
πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘

// , I have bookmarked this.

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cocoonkid profile image
cocoonkid

This is great I like this. Tho I use raindrops.io for this purpose. Kudos to you!