buku VS grasp

https://github.com/jarun/buku

buku bookmark manager. Gets more useful as you age.

Buku is solid.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I stopped using many online cloud services because they get shut down or acquired by a big fish. Instead, I am using buku[1], a command-line utility to store, tag, search and organize bookmarks on a Linux desktop. But, it should work on any OS due to Python. All I have to do is backup a single ~/.local/share/buku/bookmarks.db SQLite file.

[1] https://github.com/jarun/buku

There is an extension called Grasp which acts as a web clipper, you highlight the relevant part & add a tag. It's pretty great. But it only appends to a file. https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html witch is another small example of automation to a certain extent.

I use grasp to capture links from the browser. It also captures any text you have selected on the page and you can add tags and a description.

I'm not using browser bookmarks anymore, instead I am just using plaintext files (org-mode in my case). When I want to make a bookmark I use grasp [0] to simply capture in in the 'links.org' file, possibly with some notes/selected text and tags. Now and then I would skim through this file, refile the most important/interesting things to other files, and put the rest into 'later.org' (things I might never look at again :) ). The upside is that bookmarks become alive this way, you can easily edit them, add more context, interlink, etc.

I also mirror saved items from other services (e.g. reddit/HN/twitter/instapaper) as plaintext org-mode files, via orger [1].

Then, all of this feeds into Promensia [0] [1], a tool I wrote that serves as a web browsing copilot and surfaces my bookmarks (or any relevant links, really) when I'm browsing.

That way I don't need to worry about spending too much time processing bookmarks and that I'd never read them, I can just read the most interesting stuff and the rest is searchable (so I use it as a knowledge base/personal search engine), and surfaces in my browser via Promnesia, so I can find out if I have some relevant information in my knowledge base without actively searching. I don't need to suffer from vendor lock-in (even if the service/tool is open, migration is always painful), I can just add another adapter to my system and feed it into Promnesia/Orger.

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp#readme

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507

In tech terms, behind the scene, yes is complex, but in practical terms just see https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp/ :-)

Grasp (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasp and https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html for the system/python listener) and Promnesia (https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html) help me "import" quick bookmarks to org-mode (I can't use org-protocol with firejail, at least I have to tweak firejail and I never tried to do so). They demand a small effort (perhaps a quick python venv somewhere in the home to remain self-contained) but they are helpful.

for reading, I'm currently trying to set up elfeed and come sort of capture like grasp. My idea is to use org-mode to also log those things (kinda) effortless.