bookmark - IndieWeb
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From IndieWeb
is a
post
that is primarily comprised of a URL, often title text from that URL, sometimes optional text describing,
tagging
, or quoting from its contents.
For a blog consisting exclusively of bookmark posts, see:
linkblog
Why
Bookmarks are useful for saving things to read later or build a recommended reading list. Post bookmarks on
your own site
instead for all the usual
reasons
Here are some community members' reasons for posting bookmarks:
I bookmark things usually as 'read later', 'will read again' or 'should reference in a paper'. -
I bookmark to build my library, and help build ours. I bookmark research articles, blog posts and other media and then use tags to make them easily sortable. I also syndicate bookmarks for my audience on social media channels who find the resources helpful.
Greg McVerry
I bookmark as a way of sharing content for others (a recommended reading list of sorts), but also as a way to have a record for myself of interesting things I may want to come back to later
Jamie Tanna
Instead use
If your bookmark post expands to include author-written (by you) content beyond the URL, and perhaps a few hashtags, then another post type may be more appropriate instead, such as:
quoting some text from the page — use a
quotation
post, unless quoting all of a post, then use a
repost
adding commentary — if you want the original author to consider the commentary, use a
reply
, if it’s observations about the link you’re generally sharing, make it a
note
post.
How
How to markup
To post a bookmark, the post's
h-entry
must have a property
u-bookmark-of
with the URL you are bookmarking.
For example, to bookmark
The trailing preposition "of" helps communicate this in the same way that we have
u-in-reply-to
instead of
u-reply
For bookmarks that contain both a link and a meaningful title, consider using
u-bookmark-of h-cite
instead:
How to display
(stub)
Displaying bookmark posts are challenging because the display should clearly show both the author of the bookmark (as its a bookmark post), and the author of the thing being bookmarked (as well as that thing)
There are at least three types of bookmark presentation to specifically design:
permalink
presentation of a bookmark post
list
presentation of multiple bookmark posts (e.g. on a post-type-specific
archive
page)
composite
list of bookmarks and other posts (e.g. on a
homepage
(To be expanded with more advice / screenshots of existing approaches for each)
Showing Bookmarks vs Submissions
IndieNews is an aggregator where you can submit posts via Webmention. You can either submit your own posts by adding a u-syndication link from your post to IndieNews, or you can submit other posts by making a bookmark post on your site and submitting that.
For direct submissions, IndieNews displays the name of the post and the domain name of the site (see bottom post in screenshot).
For submissions of bookmarks, IndieNews displays the name and domain of the bookmarked post as if it were posted directly, and indicates that it was "submitted from" the domain of the person who submitted it. (see above post in screenshot).
How to POSSE
There are some emerging patterns for how people
POSSE
bookmark posts in particular.
POSSE to Twitter with Emoji
Similar to POSSEd post types like
jam
and
read
one could prepend POSSE posts to Twitter with an
emoji
to indicate the post type. Rather than simply posting a title and a URL, the emoji could help to indicate that a bookmarked post hasn't (necessarily) been read by the poster. Emoji use on Twitter is particularly effective as the platform limits the number of characters to indicate sentiment. One can also take advantage of the concept of Twitter cards to shoehorn additional information from the post into the tweet (though this is only displayed on some twitter clients/outlets).
Examples:
Chris Aldrich
POSSE to Twitter
Bookmark emoji appears in Twitter card rather than in main tweet, this allows additional sentiment to be placed in both the Tweet body as well as the Twitter card:
POSSE to another Twitter
A number of individuals POSSE bookmarks explicitly to a different
account than their "normal" or "primary" one.
Examples:
Jeremy Keith
POSSEs from his site's bookmarks to
...
Related examples (bookmarking to another Twitter in general, might not be POSSEing)
@nelson
posts bookmarks to
...
Design of POSSE bookmark tweets
Alternative approaches exist regarding the content POSSEd to Twitter, mainly based on the intended audience and whether the post contains just the bookmark or broader commentary:
Jeremy Keith
provides short commentary in the post but has, based on feedback regarding unnecessary clicks, decided to share only the bookmarked URL on his Twitter feed:
Sebastian Greger
is testing various approaches that feature the URL of his own post, in order to always present the reader with his commentary:
linking only to the bookmark post
links to both the bookmarked website and the bookmark post, e.g.
(N.B. only the last URL in a Tweet is shown as a link preview on Twitter, see
IndieWeb Examples
Aaron Parecki
Aaron Parecki
previously used
WordPress
to post bookmarks on
aaron.pk/bookmarks
using a custom Wordpress post type since 2010-12-18. He now uses
Quill
to post bookmarks to
p3k
as of 2014-09-07
[1]
These bookmark posts contain:
URL
Title/text
Optional tags
Optional snippet of text manually copied from the URL as a way to remember why I bookmarked it (
example
Optional note about why I bookmarked it
Video showing browser bookmarklet from
Quill
used to post bookmarks:
Sebastian Greger
Sebastian Greger
has posted bookmarks since 2014-06-12
Bookmarks contain:
nested
h-cite
for bookmark's name, photo, and URL
date published
name of bookmark post
commentary
Barnaby Walters
Barnaby Walters
uses
Taproot
to post bookmarks on his site waterpigs.co.uk as
notes
tagged with "
" since ????-??-??. These bookmark posts contain:
URL
Tags
Text note with one or more URLs inline
Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith
posts bookmarks on his own site at
adactio.com/links
since ????-??-?? and
POSSEs
them to
Delicious
. These bookmark posts contain:
URL
Title
tags
Description
He also displays webmentions received from bookmark posts:
Shane Becker
Shane Becker
imports bookmarks to
veganstraightedge.com/bookmarks
by
PESOSing
from
Instapaper
(tagged with "imported:from=instapaper.com") and
Pinboard
(tagged with "imported:from=pinboard.in") since ????-??-??. He sub-categorizes them by adding a "fave", "read-later", "watch-later" or "listen-later" tag to a bookmark post. The linked title of a bookmark post goes to the bookmarked URL, not the bookmark post's permalink. Bookmark posts have a
before the title to help indicate that the link goes to an external site. The
is applied using a CSS :before selector and a content property to keep it out of the actual HTML/microformat content. These bookmark posts contain:
URL
Title
tags
Excerpt (optional)
Description (optional)
Ben Roberts
Ben Roberts
has been able to post bookmarks since 2014-10-10, with
Postly
though has not used it much yet other than as testing.
atomicules
User:atomicules.co.uk
, taking a slightly different approach, I decided I did not want to host or own every bookmark I make as I would never have a self-hosted tool as quick and as convenient as Pinboard, etc, nor did I want the clutter of bookmarks offtopic to that of my website. I did, however, already have link type posts, so I decided to start syndicating these out to
Pinboard
(See that page for my example).
Larry Kooper
At
IndieWebCamp 2016 NYC2
, attendee Larry Kooper demoed a
bookmark site
he built. The
code is available on Github
Chris Aldrich
Chris Aldrich
uses a customized bookmarklet in combination with the
Post Kinds
plugin for
WordPress
. Bookmarks contain:
URL
Title
Date
Optional author, name of source, tags & categories
oEmbed
of original page if available
Ability to redirect the entire post to the original content using a canonical URL
I also have an optional workflow using
PressForward
that not only includes the above, but which can scrape the content of the page via the
Mercury
API to make an
archival copy
on my site if I wish. I also use
Post Archival
to
trigger an archival copy to the Internet Archive
as well.
POSSE
copies are often sent to
, usually with a bookmark emoji as described above and other optional services like Mendeley, diigo, delicious, scoop.it, flipboard, stubleupon, and others as appropriate.
See this link for more
Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links
rhiaro
Amy Guy
stores bookmarks in
sloph
as ActivityStreams 2.0 Add activities to the Bookmarks collection, visible at
rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Related:
Script for porting Firefox bookmarks backup to AS2
Sebastiaan Andeweg
Sebastiaan Andeweg
posts bookmarks as of 2016-11-20, showing the text 'Seb heeft [title] door [author] gebookmarkt.' with a bookmark-icon. No quotes. Similar as a like (with a heart icon), but for more serious articles, meaning 'interesting' or 'please also read this' and in some cases 'want to read' or 'want to read again later'.
I realised (on 2017-08-06) that I bookmarked something twice. They ment more "I want to read this" than "please read this too". Thinking about changing how I use them, more into an archive of interesting articles, with categories and notes, to revisit and actually add value to the post.
"I subscribed to my own bookmarks feed in my reader, back when I used a reader. That was the purpose: to be able to revisit interesting articles.
[2]
Marty McGuire
Marty McGuire
uses
Quill
to post bookmarks as of 2017-04-25 (
example
). Bookmarks contain:
URL
Title
Date
Tags
Optional blockquote snippet copied from the original text
Jamie Tanna
Jamie Tanna
uses
Hugo
to post bookmarks as of
2019-05-06
. Bookmarks contain:
URL
Date
Tags
Commentary (optional)
Jamie's approach is to use bookmarks as a means to share interesting posts with him in the future or others reading the blog.
Murray (theAdhocracy)
Murray
posts bookmarks as
notes
as of
2020-02-17
(though has backfed some earlier notes from other services/older versions of his site as well). Bookmarks contain:
URL
Title
Author (optional)
Date (published and updated)
Tags (and category)
Commentary (optionally/often includes blockquotes)
The primary purpose is to build an information store and save useful resources, which can then be searched and cross-linked. Commentary/quotes serve as a means to permanently record/archive the most important parts as well to guard against link rot or removal.
He also sometimes includes references/further reading on articles marked up as bookmarks (as well as
likes
and
mentions
) e.g.
. These contain:
URL
Title
Author (optional)
Commentary (optional)
capjamesg
capjamesg
publishes bookmarks on a dedicated /bookmarks page of his blog. Bookmarks are typically reserved for content that James may want to refer back to in the future more so than a "like" post.
Bookmark posts display:
The URL of the resource being bookmarked
A title
Date published
The title of the document bookmarked (if available)
Max Dietrich
Max Dietrich
is using Strapi to publish bookmarks since 2021-07-30
These bookmark posts contain:
URL
Title
Description
And optionally some Tags
Bookmarks are published at
zacharykaiwrites
Has a
bookmarks page
on his personal site, and uses
indiebookclub
and
Micropub
to post to his
microblog
on his book blog, but the system still needs updating.
Past Examples
Kyle Mahan
⚠️ Kyle's site is now unfortunately a
zombie
site, so links have been replaced with archived versions
Kara Mahan
used
Red Wind
to post bookmarks on his site kylewm.com since 2014-07-08:
Archived example
Site no longer live.
Tools
Monocle
Monocle
consumes bookmark posts.
IndieNews
IndieNews
consumes bookmark posts.
Indieweb.xyz
Indieweb.xyz
consumes bookmark posts.
Additional Indieweb Discussion
2016/Brighton/indiebookmarks
Bookmark Workflow was a session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2016.
2017/Berlin/bookmarks
Bookmarks & Archiving was a session at IndieWebCamp Berlin 2017.
Self-hostable Services
Shaarli
Wallabag
, while technically more of a
read later
type of service, it could be bent to be used as a self-hosted bookmarklet service.
Jamie Tanna
used to use it for both purposes - read-it-later, but favourite posts that I wanted to come back to
Linkding
is self-hosted, fast, bookmark manager which can be designated public or private. (See
Owning my bookmarks over 20 years
Postmarks
syndicates tagged bookmark posts via
ActivityPub
Silos
Bookmark hosting silos
Tagging focused silos
Delicious
Delicious
, now defunct, was launched in 2003 and was among the first to implement tags, and user-tagging (AKA folksonomy), and present a UI of popular tags.
Magnolia
Magnolia
, now defunct, was one of the larger competitors to
Delicious
, but closed down shortly after they lost all their users data in an outage in 2009.
Pinboard
Pinboard
is a paid bookmarking silo launched in 2009. Got lots of users from
Delicious
after the latter announced its supposed shutdown in 2010.
The below image is of the bookmark display on Pinboard, which adopts a text-first somewhat minimalist design which shows the name, when it was bookmarked, and by whom. A description and tags can be optionally added.
Supports both public and private bookmarks.
In late 2016 Björn Stierand created a
Known plugin for syndicating bookmarks to Pinboard
Wakelet
Wakelet
is a bookmarking
silo
service focused on
collecting
, curating, and sharing online content.
Read it later focused silos
Instapaper
Instapaper
was created by
Marco Arment
in 2008, sold to betaworks in 2013, got (
bought by Pinterest
) in 2016, then
became independent again in 2018
(originally Read It Later) was discontinued in 2025. It was owned by
Mozilla
for most of its existence, and had integration with Mozilla's
Firefox
browser. Starting in Firefox version 57, a Pocket-icon appears in the address-bar. When clicked upon, it showed a little popup with 'Saving...' and then 'Saved to Pocket', with links to remove the bookmark or view the list. It was also possible to add comma separated tags to the bookmark.
The reading list 'My List' contained all your bookmarked pages. When you hovered over an item, it gave you options to share, archive, delete, re-tag, or favorite the item. Clicking the check-mark archived the item and removed it from the list and added it to archive, so you could keep track of what you had read and what you hadn't.
Pocket removed double entries: if you saved a page twice (by accident?) it wouldn't save it twice on your list. If you had previously marked it as read, however, it would appear again as unread in your reading list.
Sharing and social focused silos
is a visual bookmark hosting silo where users "pin" (bookmark), or "repin" (repost a bookmark of) a page with a specific image from that page to a "pinboard" (named bookmark collection) and follow other users and/or pinboards created by others.
Bought
Instapaper
in 2016, which later bought itself back to independence in 2018.
Pownce
Pownce
enabled posting of a couple of different types of content to ones profile, one of which was links. It remains
famous as the creator
of
oEmbed
Tumblr
Tumblr
enables posting of a couple of different types of content to ones profile, one of which is links.
Academic or Research bookmarking silos
The following silo services, often with other social features built in, are often used by those in academia to bookmark research papers and journal articles:
Mendeley
Citeulike
shutting down on 2019-03-30
Bibsonomy
Sciencewise
Other bookmarking silos
diigo
Larder
, a bookmark silo marketed toward developers
StumbleUpon
Reading.am
- for
reading
related bookmarks
- added private bookmark functionality to the app in February 2018 and to the website later that year.
2018-02-28
Sarah Perez
Twitter launches Bookmarks, a private way to save tweets
archived
2019-07-22
@davidmead
"Since when has @twitter had bookmarks? And why?"
Similar Post Kinds
Text of a
bookmark post
is most often the title of the linked resource, i.e. created by the author of the linked resource, rather than the person posting the bookmark post.
This is a key distinction between a bookmark and other kinds of posts.
Reply
The text of a
reply
is written by the person posting the reply, and often a new statement in response to the original post.
If the text of a bookmark post is written as commentary on the bookmark, then that should likely be a reply post instead.
Repost
The text of a
repost
comes from the entirety of the
content
of a bookmark rather than the name or title of the bookmarked resource.
If the text of a bookmark post is the entirety of the contents of the thing that is bookmarked, then that should likely be a repost instead.
Quotation
The text of a
quotation
comes from part of the
content
of a bookmark rather than the name or title of the bookmarked resource.
If the text of a bookmark post is merely part of the contents of the thing that is bookmarked, then that should likely be a quotation instead.
Likes
There is a relatively strong semantic difference between a
like
and a
, but as a result of the inflexibility of many
silos
which support likes and do not have explicit bookmark functionality, the definition of a like can sometimes morph so that people in the wild will treat likes as bookmarks instead. Services like
IFTTT
can also reinforce these patterns via API by taking like/favorite inputs and easily converting them to bookmarks on services like
and
Instapaper
(or even one's own website).
Examples
On
many people often use the
like
(or previously
favorite
) functionality (or sometimes even
repost
) to indicate a bookmark.
"likes" don't always mean support aka 🔖 --
Ana R
Twitter bio on 2018-05-07
"Wish Twitter would distinguish between "favorite" and "save for later." People could infer some pretty misleading things..." --
Matt Reed (@deandad)
5:47 PM - 6 Aug 2013
"One of the things I do a lot on Twitter, for example, is retweet stories that I find interesting in order to come back to them later." - Cathie LeBlanc in
Design of My Site on 2018-06-07
Twitter ultimately launched a bookmark feature (primarily within their mobile interface):
Twitter launches Bookmarks, a private way to save tweets
on TechCrunch 2018-02-18; Includes some discussion about confusion and misinterpretation
Observable
The notebook service
Observable
conflates their like and bookmark functionality:
"Like a notebook? Let the author know by clicking the like button in the top-right corner of the page! Liking a notebook also helps you find it again quickly by browsing your likes. In the future, we’ll use likes to help you find interesting and delightful notebooks.
--
Observable Notebook
on 2018-05-07
Micro.blog
Micro.blog
specifically goes out of its way to not promote a culture of collecting or displaying
likes
or
favorites
but conflates the idea of bookmarks with private favorites. When favoriting a post on micro.blog it is saved as a private bookmark
within one's account
and doesn't display on or send any notifications to the original post. See also:
The nice thing about that is that if we ever officially rename "Favorite" to "Bookmark" in the M.b UI, other clients will automatically update as well.
--
Manton Reece
at
2018-07-20 21:45
Brainstorming
Thoughts on Bookmarks and meaning:
2017-10-13
Chris Aldrich
For me there are various post types that essentially all boil down to being bookmarks...
2018-03-10
Chris Aldrich
Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links
Daily Summaries
Tantek Çelik
: If I were to start posting "bookmark" posts, I'd actually rather start posting bookmark
collection
posts, semi-automatically, that is:
collect bookmarks during the day (with their article name if any, optionally tags I might add)
once a day, have my site automatically post a bookmark collection post of the bookmarks I’ve made that day.
reason: I don't want to add lots of noise to my stream every time I click and read/save a link.
reason: I do want to share what I’ve been seeing/reading lately on the web, and a one-day granularity seems reasonable. There’s a temporal clustering of news related articles that make sense. Or a clustering of pages about a particular topic I researched or deep dived into.
I think I want this for
read
posts as well, specifically of read posts of web articles (I still like the idea of separate read post for each book I read / progress I make in a book)
I feel I have seen examples of "daily links" posts from folks who only post once daily lists of links they’ve save or read, but I can't think of any offhand.
Martijn van der Ven
06:25, 11 August 2021 (PDT): This feels a lot like Jason Kottke’s take.
Kottke.org has a Quick Links section
that is the place where bookmarks are collected “during the day”. For people subscribed to
the main Atom feed
these are collected into two entries. Unable to link such a post as they do not have a home on the internet. See
screenshot showing “Two Quick Links for Monday Evening”
, the second post of 2021-08-10, with the first post “Four Quick Links for Monday Afternoon” visible in the sidebar.
Sessions
2016/Dusseldorf/bookmarking
2016/Brighton/indiebookmarks
2017/Berlin/bookmarks
See Also
linkblog
post
note
h-cite
read later
IndieWeb Example:
with POSSE tweet
and archive of bookmarks:
a list of "every bookmark manager ever made" by category
a bookmark service for productivity; has a silo option, but is also open source for self-hosting
humor:
"Which are you? I’m “chaotic good.” Also, once a piece of scrap paper has become a bookmark, it must STAY a bookmark forever 😂😂
#WritingCommunity #writercommunity #readerscommunity #readers #mglit #yalit #fiction #22debuts #scifi #fantasy #horror #books #amreading #amwriting"
@AshleyW2591
January 14, 2022
Raindrop
, a bookmark manager with a pro feature that allows for backing up bookmarks and data
IndieWeb Example:
User:http://Nicolas-hoizey.com
(and many earlier posts), with plain text POSSE to Mastodon:
with the syntax: 🔗 “link-destination-title” by link-author / hashtags / ️️⚓️ original-post-permalink / screenshot-of-link-destination
Retrieved from "
Category
PostType