What I'm trying
Earlier today I opened too many tabs of interesting things I wanted to look at. This happens more often than I care to admit. And more often than not, I'll bookmark all those great resources or copy paste their URLs somewhere I think I'll look again soon, and just forget about them. But today I decided to try something differentโI made a Cardsmith board to keep track of things I want to read/watch/listen to. (Full disclosure: I used to work at Cardsmith.)
My hope is that having a more visual and organized view of all the things will help me 1) not feel overwhelmed by all the tabs open and the seemingly endless internet and 2) be more intentional when consuming resources, noting takeaways or sharing them wherever they could be useful.
Here's a screenshot of part of my board right now (you can also click the link above to check it out):
What do you do?
So, I'm curious! How do you store and manage all the links and resources you've come across? Links to videos you want to watch later, or long articles you want to finish reading... eventually.
Do you use a bookmark manager? A GitHub repo? A Trello board? Something else? I'd love if you'd share a link to it, or a screenshot!
Top comments (31)
Hey! I use an app called Pocket - you basically use the share menu on your phone as if you was sharing the article with a contact but instead, you 'share' it with your 'Pocket' and it gets saved for offline viewing. This can be saved from any app including the phone browsers, Medium, and pretty much any other app! Very cool
I have used pocket for years then one day they lost my account. Also after storing so many stuffs It was difficult to find old ones even with the search. It's general for any service I had tried as I said, so it's better to create your own system like I did.
+1 Pocket
It's the only thing with 'tags' where I actually use the tags. For the most part I tag things with what they're about: 'ios', 'js', 'cloud' etc.
A few special tags I use are: 'someday', which is for much longer articles or projects that would require more than 10 minutes to read or do.
Then when I have some extended downtime, I know where to find them.
I really like it for when I'm at work. Between builds (obligatory xkcd) I can usually browse dev.to or hckrnews.com to find interesting articles, but I don't have enough time to read them while on the clock. So I send them off to Pocket and check them out later.
I use Evernote's Web Clipper to save resources. I make sure to tag them so that I can find them easily. I am trying out Session Buddy right now. If I am working on something specific but I need to stop for some reason, I save the session so that I can come back to it later.
I have tried one after another, each time it was too improductive as I have vast interests in many stuffs so I have finally decided to build a whole system based on new format called the ReAdABLE human format, so I can quickly collect, organize and publish at the same time or at differed time depending on context and needs. You can see for example this mybookmarks.space/deming/ is a markdown page generated from this one github.com/lepinekong/mybookmarks/...
All you need is red-lang.org (1 Mb download) and clone the repo. There is VSCode extension for that language to make this more pleasant and you can create VSCode Snippet example given here mycodesnippets.space/readable/vsco... also in the same ReAdABLE format.
I'm now having 30 sites like that just to store many stuffs from bookmarks to todolist, user stories , articles, anything in easy and quick to write structured format even quicker than markdown (I will write the 3rd article on redlang soon on devto as I stopped to do so after 2nd one dev.to/lepinekong/red-for-hopeless...) etc.
Session Buddy looks like a great extension! Would love to hear your thoughts on it after you've used it more.
Will do! :)
Do you ever find Evernote has an overwhelming feature set? I gotten a bit lost each time I've tried with it and have fallen off each time I've tried using it.
haha, you promoted me to take a look at what all I can do with. There is definitely a lot. I just learned that you can have newsletters delivered right to it to keep your inbox clean. I'm going to have to try that :)
I just use it for two things though: bookmarking and note taking.
I think it may have been simpler in the past. It has definitely feature-creeped.
I use Google Keep's Chrome extension because I already have Google Keep on all my Android devices. In a few clicks it lets me save a link along with the title and add a label to it. I use it a lot for stuff that looks interesting but I don't have time to read now or things I actually find helpful. It makes them easily searchable.
+1
I create Jira tickets for myself... But actually it's because most of my "read later"s are work-related. For personal things, my general attitude is "read now or not ever." I close all my browser tabs at the end of each day.
I wish I had a similar attitude! I tend to think there's always time later, but it seems way more efficient to just do/read things in the moment.
Well, I'm 36 now and I've finally realized time is not infinite. If I don't care enough to read a thing now, then I just close the tab and move on with my life! Same with TV shows, movies, etc.
To wax philosophical for the moment, I like the word "decide", whose etymology literally means "cut off". Deciding is like cutting away things you're not going to do. Cut away the stuff you don't really care about, trim life down to its essence, and you're left with what matters (to you).
Hi SJ, Awesome idea with CardSmith. I'll say this has been a problem for me too i have a long list in my bookmark that i always forget to go back to. Now i just use Pocket and i also created a GitHub repo for keeping track of awesome thing i find on the internet. I called it awesome resources. github.com/lauragift21/awesome-lea...
Nice! I knew someone out there had to have a repo (: The Sick Picks section is ๐ฏ. Thanks for sharing!
For the last few months, I've been using Toby, an extension for saving bookmarks and creating collections. I'm not super satisfied with it because there's no mobile version.
Last week, I created a raindop account which supports many different platforms as well as tagging and collections.
I like bookmark collections I can share, like my most popular one is for diversity/inclusion content.
Both of those look really great. I'd love to see your diversity/inclusion collection, if you're willing to share!
Sure!
On raindrop: raindrop.io/collection/4650027
On Toby: gettoby.com/p/f35j3hcgaz33
After using Google Keep, OneTab and saving things in my Telegram (which I still do xd), I have json files where I store knowledge like this:
I have these files for
The idea is that I want to have a knowledge base of the things I learn and live, and to fill it across my whole life. This knowledge base should be easy to access no matter it's 2018 or 2060. I.e. it shouldn't depend ONLY on the cloud or any specific software. Instead, a plain-text file should always contain all that knowledge.
Right now I edit the files in vim. To put new entries, I use vim registers with entry templates. I have small node.js scripts that filter these (gigantic xd) json files according to several criteria, and that give me insights about my lifestyle (i.e. the days I don't work on my side projects I tend to go to bed later and I sleep worse).
When I get more free time, I would like to create a graphical tool that allowed you to do this, a terminal utility, a Telegram bot, and Chrome/Firefox extensions. This would make entry writing way faster, even if you would always will have access to your offline copy in a text editor.
That's so rad. Thanks for sharing! Would love to see/hear about the GUI you create for it eventually!
Of course I use the dev.to save button ๐
Hehe Ben. Nice twist
I know a lot of folks use one tab to help manage links. I personally don't have a great format. We have a #reading channel in our slack team and sometimes I just DM resources to myself ยฏ_(ใ)_/ยฏ
OneTab looks awesome! Some really cool features in there.
I simply gave it up some time ago. Now I write markdown-articles about great sources and publish them. Everything that is not worth publishing is not worth keeping. On my way to those articles I use Twitter-likes, "mustread" of feedly, the dev.to save button and sometimes trello.
Before that I used saved.io because of their funny url-technique that is device agnostic and can be used with mobile and without the need of apps.
Before that I tried nearly all bookmarking tools starting with diigo and ending with toby and many many more between them...
I have a trello with my colleague called "Assets and cool shit" where we paste links of cool articles divided in Columns like "Frontentd, Git, PHP, etc."
Right now we are keeping track of our resources through trello connected to our slack. It's not ideal but it does the job. For now.
I use Pocket, although I admit I often forget to ever look at them again. I just save things and then forget like you said. Now I have so much stuff saved that itโs a bit overwhelming!
Haha, yep! I have so many things saved in browser bookmarks, emails sent to myself, read later lists on Medium and here; it's definitely overwhelming. I think having the Cardsmith board helps a bit because it's much more visually pleasing than a dropdown full of lists. It still has the potential to get overwhelming if I don't actually read things and just let them pile up, so I guess we'll see.
I also like Tony's comment in this discussion about having an attitude of "read now or not ever" as a way of mitigating the overwhelming-ness of too many things.