More on bookmarks
September 11, 2025
I wish could summarize my journey with saving bookmarks on my computer in a succinct way, but I don’t think it’s possible. See my previous post on the subject, A lightweight alternative to SingleFile.
Before getting into more technical details, I stumbled into a post by Rao on how he frames reading in a certain way:
But mere usefulness is too strict a criterion. An equal goal is pleasure. I’ve rewired my brain so reading to learn is highly pleasurable. … Reading is highly personal. I don’t write about my reading algorithm to recommend it to you or for didactic purposes. Rather, this is descriptive.
I feel much the same about reading. I do it because it brings me a certain amount of joy. It’s hard for me to really describe it to other people. We read a lot on our phones but consuming social media is not the source of deep ideas. Going back into my collection of bookmarks is research.
Rao also talks about the pleasant feeling of being lost in a deep state of inquisitive thought only achievable at a large research library. We are of course limited on our time and attention but a well maintained collection of bookmarks can provide enough of a jumping off point to reinvigorate a spark of curiosity.
As far as the digital management of bookmarks is concerned, what I mean really are links. For over ten years I have subscribed to Pinboard to save links but although I have been saving them no more than a few a day, I am reliant on Pinboard’s service and if it went away one day, then all of the collected links and HTML snapshots would be lost and I wouldn’t have an easy way to rebuild all of the effort I have spent gathering these links together.
I’m still in transition but the end result is an entry in TiddlyWiki for each link and an HTML snapshot using SingleFile in a folder in Dropbox called ref. This remains a manual and tedious process but I have automated as much of it as I can.
The links were converted from Pinboard’s JSON export into individual tiddlers for import into TiddlyWiki with a shell script. I add a topical tag, the date the link was published and then save the HTML snapshot. The problem is not all of these links are live anymore on the web. I will visit the link and switch between archive.ph, archive.org, and my own Pinboard archive. I will choose the best version and save it as a SingleFile. Once it is saved, I have a script to shorten the file name and move it to the ref folder. I then go back and update the status of the local-copy field in TiddlyWiki to [[ref]].
I’m sure there is still room to automate but the real bottleneck is the physical limit of switching back and forth between the browser, emacs, and TiddlyWiki. Here are a few keyboard shortcuts I’ve rigged up to help with this.
ctrl-0- (in Firefox) move mouse to SingleFile icon to save the webpagef5- launch emacs1(in emacs) jump to newest file, run shell script to rename it, and then move it to ref1(in Firefox) home, with Vimiumcmd-`(in Firefox) after selecting local-copy field in TiddlyWiki, replace the text with[[ref]], save the tiddler and return to the top of the page.
Physical and network limitations affect me more than anything else. Physical in the sense using my laptop is fatiguing on the wrists no matter what. Network as in I am waiting for the pages to load or download. Being consistent with saving links I encounter as bookmarks in this system is a challenge, but the long term goal is to always have a local copy to reference and re-host should the original link go down.