Hi everyone,
I recently started writing a newsletter (check it out here if you are at all interested in neuroscience). I now have a need to save links throughout the week to share with my subscribers. I can come across these links on my iPhone, Mac, or my work PC – so ideally my solution works on all platforms. Currently, I save links as tasks in Things 3 (ugh, i know) and email links to myself when I’m on the work PC.
I’m not happy with this workflow. Any ideas on how I could improve it?
Congrats on the launch! Tangent, but I have been thinking about doing a newsletter off and on. Did you start with an audience, or are you building up from there?
There’s many solutions for this. Raindrop.io (app store link) is the one to beat these days, far as I can tell, but you might also consider having a tag in a given RSS reader (e.g., Feedly), using a free license of Evernote (do those still exist?)… there are many options. I think all of those options are cross-platform!
More detail about your ideal workflow might help facilitate advice.
If you are a Gmail user take a look at Google Keep.
I highly recommend GoodLinks!
+1 for Raindrop.io. Have been using for 2 years now and never had a problem with saving and organizing bookmarks and links. It offers good mobile apps so you can easily save links on your iPhone or Android smartphone.
Hi Ryan,
I started with basically no built-in audience. However, I posted about it on FB to friends and family and now have almost 100 subscribers. To get new subscribers, I post my issues on reddit and repost on Medium. If easy-of-use is your #1 concern, I highly recommend Substack.
I think I’m gonna check out GoodLinks and just give up on saving links from a Windows PC
I’ve heard good things about https://pinboard.in/ however I don’t have experience myself
I thought this was useful to see some of the differences
https://zapier.com/blog/best-bookmaking-read-it-later-app/
I was going to suggest pinboard, which I have been using for years, but I wasn’t sure of a simple way to retrieve a set of bookmarks to insert elsewhere, like a newsletter. You can tag the bookmarks, and even get an RSS feed for a given tag, but I don’t know a way to simply copy/paste or otherwise export selected bookmarks.
On the Mac there are lots of free Chrome/Chromium browser extensions that will copy tab URLs to the clipboard or export them.
With something like the Rich URL or TabCopy extension you can select a text fragment Select a text fragment, press the extension button or keyboard shortcut, then auto-paste a text fragment together with the page address
How do you send a link to GoodLinks from Mac Chrome?
You can use the share sheet with Safari, but no joy with Chrome.
The Share menu (and the GoodLinks action there) is available in Chrome > File > Share
(macOS 11.2)
I am using Obsidian to store all my bookmarks so they become part of my personal knowledge base, searchable and linked to notes and articles on the topic. It makes them so much more than just a bookmark.
I have a Keyboard Maestro macro to create a MD file with a simple structure that I can quickly add further notes to. I trigger this from a button on my StreamDeck when I am in Safari. It puts the file on my desktop so I can add a note. I then have a button which adds a KB tag and Hazel then moves it to Obsidian.
Have attached an example. Apart from the note in the middle, everything is automated.
I’m using nb for the same purpose.
While it’s mainly a note taking cli app, it’s bookmarks feature it’s amazing, you can get the content of the url without all the html noise (a readability like feature), can add tags, and files are saved in .md format so they are usable with a lot of other apps.
I mean, from this you get this:
Thanks @memex for this. Looks really interesting.
I would like to make my macro smarter with it able to extract more of the page but I struggle with the code. Do you know if the script you are using is able to be embedded into a Keyboard Maestro macro to pull more info from the site?
I am using DevonThink as an alternative to this to supplement my bookmarking. I save the web site as markdown clutter free and then drag from Devon to my Obsidian stack. The results are variable with some really good but other times it misses the main content completely. Not sure why.
Well once you set up nb (it needs a folder where it creates subfolders for every notebook, the default being “home”) the command to save a url is just a shell command:
nb url-of-the-page -t tag1,tag2,tag3
So it can be easily embedded in keyboard maestro with the “Execute a Shell Script” action.
The only downside of nb is in that it need to create sub folders in the “operative” folder you set it up to. If you leave the default (~/.nb) it’s not a problem since is hidden; I used a “notes” folder in iCloud Drive, now I have notes/home, notes/bookmarks and so on.
Apart from that you can do whatever you want with the .md files
It might depend on the html of the page you are saving, but I’m no html expert so it’s just a guess.
Wanted to chime in and share an app I built that’s launching on Monday, March 1: DoMarks - The To-Do App For Bookmarks. Turn your bookmarks into an actionable list! It’s for iOS and macOS. You assign an action for each bookmark you add (read, listen, watch, etc). Data syncs automatically via CloudKit.
It’s built for Apple platforms as a native app. It supports the iOS share sheet via an Action Extension, and includes a Safari Extension in the Mac app. Other extensions will be supported in later releases, as will more advanced features and native Mac capabilities.
You can learn more at DoMarks.app.
You can add this bookmarklet to your bookmarks - it creates a Goodlink entry when clicked.
javascript:void(location.href='goodlinks://x-callback-url/save?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title))
