It’s been mentioned in passing on other threads, but I think it’s a prevalent enough topic to have its own dedicated one. Web surfing is something everyone does nowadays, but I’d imagine most of us in this community dial it up a notch. So: What tools, strategies, mentalities, etc. do you employ for graceful net browsing?
Whether or not you consider bookmarking a solo endeavor, this approach of collective bookmarking is at least worth acknowledging. This very community recognizes its value with the ‘Resources List for the Personal Web’. Couldn’t that project benefit from evolving from just a link list dump?What do you think about bookmarking alongside others?
Interesting links collected in new tabs from web surfing, Discord, Discourse, Mastodon and RSS
Daily/weekly/monthly I get overwhelmed at the many open tabs, lots of duplicate tabs and go through and give each a quick skim to see if it’s something I want to sit down and read with my full attention.
If want to read later > send to Pocket, otherwise close tab
Reading
Open Pocket on tablet or Kobo and start reading my saves
If article interesting > favourite and archive, otherwise delete the save
Sharing
Review favourited articles
If worth sharing on my website bookmarks page save to my metadata-library repo either directly with the action workflow runner or an iOS shortcut.
Bookmark is saved to a JSON file. The next time my website is built, the new bookmark is created as a page on website, made available on an Atom and JSON feed and cross-posted to my Mastodon account.
I have a stack of old bookmarks saved in the browser but don’t access them, I’m considering nuking them.
I still have too many tabs open and need to figure out a strategy for recording them against relevant on the go, or to be started projects.
The resource list is kind-of like this, but the concept of these repos, that anyone can contribute, and those contributions, whether accepted or rejected, are visible.
The Yesterweb had Yesterlinks (now defunct, but here’s an archive + the repo). It was searchable, and had tags. I think those are features worth at least considering. Especially when it’s something that many collaboration-based bookmark services support.
A guide-based resource approach could potentially do a lot more to help the first-time webmaster rather than the massive, mostly context-absent “tsunami” of links. The list provides a lot of options, but choice isn’t always a good thing.
I hope this, nor my original post read as a criticism, as that is not their intent. And I recognize the work required to pursue these ideas. Just looking to share, read and discuss thoughts.
I’ll see if I can split this conversation into it’s own topic as it sounds interesting to explore seperately to our bookmarking workflows
This is interesting. I’m thinking how we could build on the create your own website guide and sprinkle in various resources at different points where you need to consider one of the options presented. It could be it’s own new guide…
Firstly I’ve got a custom page with all my most-used or least-used-but-most-useful links on there organised into groups, and a few handy search boxes for web, image, maps, etc. I use New Tab Override (firefox) for setting that as my new tab page. You can see that in this screenshot from another thread
Then I also use TreeStyleTabs which I lean on quite heavily, right now I’m at ~200 tabs across ~15 top-level subtrees. Links opened in a new tab open as children of the active one, and any regular new tabs open as a new top-level tab, so everything is semi-automatically grouped by activity and sub-activities (or at least by websurfing session).
I’ve been using it that way for about a year now and find it much better than what I had before (Simple Tab Groups), since the whole tab tree is still visible at all times without being in the way. Much less cumbersome, much harder to forget that a certain tab or group of tabs exists.
Then my actual browser bookmarks folder is just a fav & forget dump.
As as side note, I’ve recentlyish started building a fully custom replacement for TST, which is maybe 40% done but also includes a VSCode-like fuzzy search tab switching popup:
One of my favorite guide sites is: Opinionated Guides. I think the webmaster has a good sense for them; like where to draw the line on things, or how much to expect of the reader(s), etc. Unfortunately, their Web Development guide is still under construction.
I used to use tree style tabs until Firefox nerfed add-ons. My use was pretty dependent on a mouse gesture add-on which probably also wouldn’t work today.
If I were going to give tab management another shot, I think what I would want today is the ability to automatically place opened bookmarks or certain pages in new groups.
That way, I could open my feed reader or mastodon client and each link I opened there would be grouped with it so I wouldn’t forget how I got there. That’s a big part of what tree style tabs did for me.
Out of curiosity, which features of TST stopped being available when it got ported to the WebExtensions api? I wasn’t using TST at the time but I know that the api and ecosystem has improved a fair bit since WebExtensions dropped (still nerfed as hell but not so badly). It currently already has the feature you mentioned here so you might enjoy trying it again!
Edit: though I totally blanked on you mentioning mouse gesture support, my bad there-- I was referring to the automatic grouping. I doubt there’s anything decent for mouse gestures these days (though you can have addons create hotkeys now so external software could probably trigger it for you quite nicely)
I love Tree-Style Tabs so much! Firefox Nightly has added official vertical tab support so I’m hoping that will improve the experience for TST as well.
That’s a very exciting development for sure. Though I looked into it a bit and it seems like they’ve already hidden any references to it in the release notes and removed it from the nightly release
That being said I’m not sure it’d help at all with TST-like plugins unless they also extended the WebExtensions API to include new features around the vertical tab bar (which, they even haven’t done that for the horizontal tab bar so I doubt they will).
I’ve actually been banging my head against the wall especially hard this week working on my own TST clone; the API currently doesn’t even include a way to uniquely refer to a given tab across browser restarts. So that’s been ‘fun’.
and go through and give each a quick skim to see if it’s something I want to sit down and read with my full attention.
