Table of Contents
Bookmarks are underrated features. It’s a good way to help you keep track of not only what you need to read but also what you need to do. Further, your bookmarks can be a way to structure your reading and your knowledge, for future reference, as Josh Leeb talked about here.
About the organization of my bookmarks
Inspired by a friend of mine, in January 2024 I started having a “reading list” of my bookmarks. As commented on RSS and why I love it, I have an RSS feed that I use to read a lot of things during the day. But, one thing that I missed was the ability to have a list of things that shall store: what I already read and what I need to read (in the future, that kind of list always increases).
So, as you can see on my bookmarks page, I have a list containing all the content that I have consumed since January 2024, not just articles, but also videos, podcasts, etc. I have another page to see them grouped by their tags, so I can easily find a specific bookmark given the tag I want.
How do I store my bookmarks?
The tool that I use to manage my bookmarks is Omnivore, an open-source bookmark manager and “read-it-later” app. For my use case, it’s a great tool, I have their extension for the browser installed that I use to store the tab that I’m seeing.
Also, I’m using their mobile app, which lets me read all bookmarks that I have. In that case, I’m using it mostly to read my “read-it-later” articles while in the gym, for example.
About the list of my bookmarks
As mentioned before, further the list on Omnivore, I have a list of my bookmarks inside this blog. I have two specific ways to organize them: grouped by month and grouped by tags.
Most of the time, I’m using it based on tags because I think that it’s how my brain
works, so it’s faster to remember what I exactly want. For example, if I want to
read something that I didn’t read yet, I can just go to the tag #for-later. If
If I want to recover something related to a computer science topic, I can go to the
tag #cs or one of their specific subtags like #cs/distsys.
Specifically about tags, mentioning again Josh Leeb, who wrote a post about Scopped Tagging Bookmarks. where he tries some approaches explains some of the problems and presents some approaches for it.
In my case, I have a kind of implementation of what he mentioned as HNT (Hierarchical Namespaced Tagging), so on Omnivore and, you can see here at my blog, I did a hierarchical structure for my tags. But, I think that it’s a process that can be error-prone sometimes, like when you need to be a more specific tag or a less specific one, or when You didn’t find a specific tag that matches your need for some bookmarks.
About the habit of reading later
Then, as mentioned before, one of my specific tags that I use (and I believe that
is one of the most used by myself), is #for-later. Specifically this tag, I use
to store every bookmark that I didn’t read yet but I think that it’s interesting.
I don’t like the idea of storing “read-it-later” articles at all seems to be more a product of a FOMO rather than a real interest, but it’s something that I am still maintaining just as a “habit”.
Also, I think that it’s a trade-off that you need to deal with, your list of read-it later articles will be growing over time, and you will need to choose and validate if that content really will be interesting for you in the future.