My Terrible Bookmarks Workflow

I recently added a link directory to my site, but I still have a ton of other pages that I’d like to share and categorize. I have a terrible habit of hoarding bookmarks and tabs and never going back to them. They desperately need a spring cleaning, but I’ve been preoccupied with my personal life and when I'm not busy with that, I'm usually procrastinating.

So lets take a look at my awful bookmarking systems. Yes, "systems", with an "s". I'm so scatterbrained that I can't even stick to just one.

First, I have my browser bookmarks. I don’t actually use most of them too often. A lot of them are old and probably don’t even work anymore. I did clean them out at one point, a few years ago, so they’re not that bad, but they could still use some organizing.

I use a Firefox addon called OneTab. It basically closes all your tabs and saves the URLs as a list of links you can access from a special pinned tab. I thought it’d stop me from hoarding so many bookmarks, and I guess it technically did, but now I just have a bunch of links hoarded there instead. A part of me wonders if having so many links saved on there is making Firefox run worse. Firefox takes a lot of CPU on my laptop, even when I only have one tab open, but I'm not sure if that's OneTab's fault or not.

Then there are social media drafts. On mastodon I have a ton of posts, mostly with links, saved as bookmarks. Like most social media platforms, Mastodon only shows you one post at a time. There’s no grid view or mass bookmark editor as far as I know, at least not on the standard web version. This makes it harder to go through each post and decide what you still need to save. This is especially annoying for me because often Mastodon struggles with lag and loading media, but that could just be a me problem.

We also have my RSS reader, Feedbro. Some of the blogs I follow post multiple times a week, some even daily, so it’s hard to keep up with those. Thankfully, this one isn't as bad as the other ones. Feedbro keeps track of all unread posts, and lets you read full posts in the reader, instead of making you open them in a new tab.

Finally, we have this random HTML file that I just copy-paste links into sometimes. I'm pretty sure it was originally the file for my old link directory, before I took it down for reorganizing, but over time it's kind of Ship of Theseus'd itself into something else. Some of them are labeled as "links to go through", sites that have been suggested to me in various places, but I want to verify before linking them in my directory. Is this really necessary? I don't know, but I know I'd feel pretty shitty if I accidentally promoted misinformation or something, so it's probably better to be safe than sorry.

Maybe once I’m done with a bunch of stuff offline I’ll set time aside to deal with all of that. This whole thing is especially annoying when I’m trying to find a specific link. I’ll think "Oh, it’s probably in this one place" and then I check, realize it’s not there and have to go through all the other tools I mentioned. It’d probably help to have them all in one place.

I feel like some of the links I have hoarded wouldn't really "fit" in a link directory. Usually, those links are to blog posts or similar freeform writing. I’ve considered making regular blogroll/postroll posts on here to help with that somewhat, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Maybe this is silly, but sometimes I find browsing independent sites to be very overwhelming. It's ironic, but I feel like the "small web" is much more sprawling than the "big web". Every site I visit has at least a handful of pages and usually some kind of outlinks/directory page. They link to other sites with their own pages and links, and those linked sites have their own stuff, and so on and so on. If you try to explore every nook and cranny of someone's site, even a small site, you'll have at least 20 tabs open by the end of the day.

I guess when I put it like that, it describes the original intent of the internet: a vast web of interconnected sites. Maybe my modern-age peabrain just can't fathom the idea of so many websites existing, let alone trying to categorize them.

I guess I could just skim everything, just focus on whatever it is I went to that site for, but that doesn't feel right. Can't really explain why though. Maybe it's the same kind of drive that leads people to 100% video games or something. Just not wanting to leave any stone unturned.