Moving My Bookmarks to My Garden

I've previously written about the idiosyncrasies of IndieWeb bookmarks, and how I consider them to be qualitatively different from other IndieWeb posts. The differences boil down to my relationship with them. For me, they are primarily a collection of references, not a way I interact with the world. Unlike notes or articles, sharing them isn't a priority; I don't particularly care about shouting my bookmarks from the digital soapbox that is my blog.

Other people obviously differ here, and I'm vaguely aware of the notion of social bookmarking, and now defunct services like delicious, but that's just not how I use them. My bookmark posts always felt a bit out of place on my website, much more subject to whims of deletion and reorganization than other forms of content.

I've been wanting to revamp them for a while. But how?

Emacs...Again

In the end I decided, unsurprisingly (if you know me), to leverage Emacs, Org mode and my digital garden to manage my bookmarks, much as I did with my reading list. It turns out that using Org mode to maintain a pile of links is quite common and there are a number of articles on the subject.

Most of the information seems to revolve around org-cliplink, a useful little package that takes a URL on the clipboard, parses out the HTML to extract the title, and inserts it as an org hyperlink into your current buffer. It's actually quite straightforward to build a simple Org mode based bookmarking system around this functionality, taking advantage of Org mode's built-in tagging functionality to organize them.

One thing that I gave up in the name of expediency is unfurling the shared link, as I do on my blog. My unfurling system uses a bespoke cocktail of Open Graph data, favicons and Microformats that I feel works pretty well across a spectrum of IndieWeb and non-IndieWeb sites. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to find any Emacs packages for extracting this metadata and since I wasn't willing to write any of it myself at this time, I simply did without.

One approach that I briefly considered was extracting my unfurling code into a standalone REST service and using an Emacs JSON package to interact with it, but while I haven't completely dismissed that possibility for the future, it felt like too much work for what I was trying to accomplish, which was a simple replacement for managing my bookmarks. In any case, integrating icons and images into an Org mode file in a way that looks reasonable while editing the text but which also exports to HTML that doesn't look like garbage is no picnic, as creating my reading list taught me.

All this to say is that, in the end, I created a very simple bookmarks page on my digital garden, and removed the corresponding links on my blog. I also removed the Lifestream feed since I felt it was becoming a bit redundant and I also felt a better argument could be made for including all my posts by default once the bookmarks were gone.

Will this last? Who can say? To be fair, it's not like I was making much use of the bookmarks on my blog when they were there. Maybe this will teach me to be more aware of what I record. Time will tell, I suppose.