Organizing all my bookmarks with Wallabag
Earlier this week I gave up. I've got too many bookmarks in too many places, and it's become impossible to find anything. I just cannot manage anymore. I've got business bookmarks in my business Nextcloud Bookmarks. I've got personal bookmarks in my personal Nextcloud Bookmarks. I've got notes to myself in Signal and Teams. I've got social media discovered bookmarks in Mastodon and Friendica. And at this point none of it makes any sense!
I know there are read-it-later services like Pocket, but I really prefer to keep my data privately hosted and within reach. So, I went on a (brief) search for a software that would accomplish all of that with the following criteria:
- Self hosted
- Prefer PHP that can function on Virtualmin - Open source
- Searchable
- Browser extension
- Android app
- Also open source
- Installable via Obtanium or F-droid - Also, a dark theme was preferred for both the site and the app, but not required. Fortunately, it has both.
It was a brief search, as I headed to AlternativeTo.net to find Pocket alternatives and found the very first result fit all my criteria. I set it up on Saturday morning before leaving the house for a small road trip. Throughout the day on Saturday and Sunday I started working through my Signal notes, deleting them as I went. There were notes there for a couple years. On Monday I moved the bookmarks from my Teams notes (ones that were relevant to me personally, not my job). Then I worked through my Mastodon and Friendica bookmarks. (This was depressing as hell, as I remembered how optimistic I was before the election.)
Right now I'm in the process of tagging and archiving sites and articles that I want to keep around. Once I make it through my couple hundred unread items I will look at moving many of my browser bookmarks to it.
Maybe after that I'll start moving my Nextcloud Bookmarks starred articles.
Organizing is time consuming, but this is going to be worth it.
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