Manage your bookmarks with tags - to the delight of yourself and colleagues

    Summary


    • Disadvantages of standard browser bookmarks
    • How to find any bookmark from a thousand in 2-3 clicks
    • Cloud bookmarks as a way to share knowledge with colleagues
    • What is wrong with current systems and why I made a new one
    • How to switch to the new system: recipes for the lazy
    • Developers of all countries - share knowledge! ;)

    Disadvantages of standard browser bookmarks


    The main thing in my opinion is the problem of bookmark managers in the browser - their tree structure. In the branches it is easy to get lost if you have hundreds of bookmarks. For example, where to put a book about stress, which I want to read on vacation? In "Books / Health / Later", or in "Later / Books / Health"? And if in the winter evening I want to open all the deferred books, how can I quickly find them all among the many categories and subcategories?


    The second big drawback is that bookmarks from the browser are difficult to share. Even if I have the category "Books / Programming / Favorite" - in order to send all these links to a colleague, you will have to copy the links one by one, for example, into a text file or instant messenger.


    How to find any bookmark from a thousand in 2-3 clicks


    By and large, the human brain is focused on structuring information through associations, i.e. sets. And to structure information using tags is often a more intuitive approach. With the help of tags you will not have to suffer - I will add a bookmark with the tags "health, books, later". And it is easy to find it later in a variety of situations: when I look through the list of books for purchase, and when I watch all the materials on health, and when I rake the bookmarks that have been set aside for later. Such a system will allow you to find any bookmark in 2-3 clicks, even if you have thousands of them. Thus, the cloud bookmark manager on tags solves the problem of structuring and searching for the necessary bookmarks.


    From personal experience, I have 25 tags for 600 bookmarks, and rarely which bookmark has more than 3 tags. Those. To find any bookmark in 2-3 clicks, when you create it, just select the desired tags in 2-3 clicks. Here you can see live how the search works with the help of tags: my profile, 300 public bookmarks .


    Cloud bookmarks as a way to share knowledge with colleagues


    If you are using a cloud-based mortgage manager, sharing collections of links is easy - they are initially online. For example, I can easily send a link to a collection of books on programming, or to favorite materials on the architecture of Rails applications, and so on.


    In addition, the public collection of links says a lot about a person, and this is another way to get to know each other better and share experiences. In the same way as developers exchange lists of favorite technologies on StackShare.


    And if someone's links are especially interesting to you, you can subscribe to the collection update via RSS. After all, if we subscribe to the news on Twitter and photos in instagramme, why do not we subscribe to new links from a colleague? For example, in this way I learn a lot about the classy modern frontend from my colleague from the previous project. The project is over, and the exchange of knowledge continues.


    What is wrong with current services and why I made a new one


    Before starting to saw my bike, I tried to find a ready service that would solve the problems described above. Alas, my searches were crowned with only partial success.


    For example, the deservedly popular service Raindrop still offers the structuring of a bookmark primarily using Categories and Subcategories. The interface is not focused on the quick addition of bookmarks with popular tags. Tag search is not as convenient as I would like. There is no public profile tagged in the system. Global RSS feeds for subscribing to user updates are also. This is my test profile for 300 bookmarks.


    The idea of ​​managing bookmarks using tags to taste is clearly not only me. Pinboard has been alive and well for 8 years. By function, it is close to my ideal - there is a search for combinations of tags, and a public profile, and RSS feeds. But tag management kills me in some places, because the system everywhere sorts the tags alphabetically, and not by their significance (i.e. the number of bookmarks). For me personally, sorting tags by importance is perceived much easier. Also, I tried to design my service for the minimum number of clicks and for the minimum "run" of the mouse. And finally - make it free for everyone. Since Pinboard is paid, which means many developers will not use them - and the idea of ​​social bookmarking for sharing knowledge is still valuable. Here is my test profile for 300 bookmarks.


    How to switch to the new system: recipes for the lazy


    First of all, the new service is free for everyone. And since it is focused on developers, you can register via GitHub in a couple of clicks.


    If you want to use the service to find new clients, I recommend starting with adding links to works from your portfolio. Moreover, thanks to the tags, you can structure it as you like — by technology, by year, by country, by role in the project, and so on. This is especially good if you have a lot of work. Since the profile is linked to GitHub, through it you can easily find your website / email and send a job offer :) Thus, a profile on DevsLike in theory can replace your personal portfolio website. Well, or add to the profile a link to your existing personal site. And also, if you want, contacts in social networks, for example, on the contacts tag. In general, everything is very flexible.


    Then I would recommend trying to add links to your profile that you would like to share with colleagues. For example, on the list of books. Personally, I find this way of organizing knowledge so convenient that I transferred to the system links to electronic versions of all the books in my library - both already read and set aside for purchase. Instead of rummaging through the iBooks and Kindle libraries on different devices, I now have a single search on all the books.


    So, if you add a few dozen bookmarks to the system, you can already “feel” it and decide whether to drag all the other bookmarks into it. If there are few bookmarks, this should be fairly easy to do with browser extensions and a bookmarklet — just add the bookmarks one at a time and tag them with a mouse. When the core tags core is formed at you, adding a new bookmark will take seconds. General recommendation: do 1-3 tags per bookmark, and do NOT make very highly specialized tags (for example, "svg" if you have less than a dozen bookmarks there).


    From the point of view of navigation quality, there can be nothing better than manual structuring. It's like refactoring a code - yes, you have to spend extra time getting the chaos in order. But it's worth it, because it is necessary to read the code orders of magnitude more often than to write it. So here - to think a few seconds over the tags for the bookmark and put them in once is necessary, and finding the right links will always be easy. At one time I dragged about 500 bookmarks at the same time, and at the same time the old garbage raked. And since then, for 4 months I have been working only in the new system, I don’t at all pull into the old one.


    If you want to conduct an experiment on the automatic import of a large number of bookmarks - please write. We will think of something, this is quite a big challenge, and it is interesting for me to try to solve this problem by joint forces.


    Developers of all countries - unite! ;)


    I do this service myself, in my free time. This is why he is very minimalistic - his task is to solve a small number of tasks as well as possible. And the main task is to help developers structure their own knowledge and effectively exchange links to useful materials.


    Since the service is being made by a developer for developers, if it will be interesting to someone, I will gladly share technical details and a detailed history of its development. And of course I will be grateful for any feedback and constructive criticism. Together we are stronger! ;)


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