The Curated Web

The Curated Web

surfing instead of scrolling

2024-03-03

I love bookmarking web pages. Like, a lot. I've been bookmarking pages for over two decades, since I got my own PC and a good internet connection in college.

My browser started to slow down with one thousand bookmarks. It was noticibly slower with two thousand. Three thousand bookmarks made it nearly unusable. It crashed at four thousand.

I then moved to an online bookmarking service. I've since moved to my selfhosted Shaarli instance. That's where I have over 22,000 bookmarks.

I have all these great sites saved, but we tend to feel like the web is bad any more. Similar to what I said in my last blog post; internet search is garbage, in part because pages are written for bots to be read by bots, while social media no long shows us what we actually follow and instead is just ads and content for more "engagement".

If we know it's bad now, how was it before? We'd "surf" the internet, actually going out looking for cool sites. We'd share what we found with others. I fondly remember surfing with friends sitting next to me.

And there were sites worth looking for. People would make their site of one specific subject just because they were a fan. There'd be some great Flash sites, like Homestarrunner that you can get lost in.

I recently read two posts about the current state of the web. Where have all the websites gone? and The Doctor's post on how we should start over with link pages.

The "where have the sites gone" post says the problem is there's no more curation of web sites. The Doctor talks about bringing back link pages.

Back to my tens of thousands of links. How do I help this curation effort? Manually copying doesn't sound like the way to go. I also don't want to just share everything.

Looking again at my Shaarli instance, I found when you export you can choose all, just private, or just public bookmarks. Everything is private by default. That's when I figured I can go through and mark anything I want to share as public. I can export just those public bookmarks. I found the exported booksmarks is both a browsable HTML page, and also the format to import into bookmarking software like Shaarli.

So you can find my exported bookmarks here. I am still going through all my bookmarks manually, but really that's the best way. Plus that lets me pick a few to share on a blog post and social media. I've tagged them for the most part, with simple tags that work for me.

I don't know how this could be useful to others. As those posts I mentioned say, just better to do something, and this is what works for me. Who knows, it's a thing in the indieweb scene to have a certain type of file at a certain location, maybe having exported bookmarks at sites at "/bookmarks.html" will catch on. Then others can link to it, maybe even a tool to search and pull in links from other sites.

Let's get back to surfing instead of scrolling.

Today's Links

Check out The Sushi Chronicles, it's the site of Cory Doctorow and his daughter as they go to sushi restaurants and write about each one. A site with one topic by people just for the fun of it. Exactly the thing I want to see and share on the web.

Speaking of finding other sites, checkout my main page of this site. The bottom has webrings I'm on.