Lou Plummer

I recently found a backup of my browser bookmarks from 2009. It was a trip down memory lane looking at what i was most interested in 15 years ago (lots of cycling) and seeing what web resources are sadly no longer with us (Google+, Stumble Upon). Before browsers started syncing bookmarks I used (and paid for) Foxmarks a browser extension that synced bookmarks between different browsers. My Chrome (work) and Safari (home) bookmarks were identical. It was great. Foxmarks died when its functions were supplanted by native browser capabilities. For the next few years I relied on Chrome’s native capabilities to sync, ditching Safari. In 2022, I switched to Microsoft Edge and I’ve remained there since (on Mac, iOS and PC).

Microsoft Edge Really Doesn’t Suck | Lou Plummer (amerpie.lol)

Raindrop.io

Last year I heard about Raindrop.io for the first time in an article from Mac Automation Tips. Raindrop.io is a multi-featured bookmark manager with a web interface and native apps for Mac and PC. It allows you to add sites to your collection via a browser extension. When you add a new bookmark you can assign it to a folder, add a note, tags and set a reminder to revisit the site later (paid feature)

The free version of Raindrop.io offers enough features for may users.

• Unlimited bookmarks
• Unlimited collections
• Unlimited highlights
• Unlimited devices
• More than 2,600 integrations (via IFTTT)
• Apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge.

The pro version offers even more benefits. If you rely on PDFs for reference, you can upload your library to Raindrop.io’s servers and take advantage of full text search and universal availability. For regular web sites, Raindrop.io saves an archive of the page when you add it to your collection so you never have to worry about losing access to an article if it gets pulled from the Internet or disappears behind a paywall. You get daily backups. I have mine saved to Dropbox so I get a local copy of them downloaded to my computer.

Integrations I use include YouTube where every time I give a video a thumbs up it gets added to Raindrop.io. My RSS service, Inoreader, allows me to add pages directly to my bookmarks and it automates it even further by also adding starred (read later) articles as well. I also imported all my articles from Pocket and for awhile synced my bookmarks with an Evernote notebook.

Obsidian Integration

I try to make Obsidian the center of my digital life. After hacking together a workflow that involved exporting my bookmarks to Dropbox via IFTTT and then moving them to my vault with Hazel, I found a community plugin that accomplished all that for me, The Raindrop Highlights Plugin can be set to only import bookmarks where you’ve made highlights or it can import every page you add to Raindrop.io (my choice). The plugin allows you to customize your import template for the body of the note and the metadata. If you choose (recommended), it will duplicate the folder structure you’ve created for your collection. Vitally, you can import the tags you assign as you add bookmarks so that if, like me, you use tag-based MOCs (maps of content) in Obsidian, your imported bookmarks will get automatically added.

If you’d occasionally like to add the full content of a page, you can use the community plugin ReadItLater which will import a website from a URL on your clipboard. Even if you don’t import the content of the page, the clean interface of an imported bookmark note invites you to add your own commentary and to add internal links to other notes on the same topic, Obsidian’s super power.