Show HN: Espial — an open-source, web-based bookmarking server | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Espial — an open-source, web-based bookmarking server

github.com

33 pointsplatz7 comments

Cool approach with the bookmarklet.

Recently daydreaming I silently wished that browsers had a standard format for syncing bookmarks.

Then you choose where you sync your bookmarks too. e.g. your own server.

Perhaps something like this exists in the extensions. But just dreaming :)

a long time ago, Chrome's whole profile system, all your data, was synced via a system atop XMPP. there used to be a demo server one could host to DIY it themselves.

the failure of us all to exercise, to make use of this, to make more systems for ourselves, resounds as one of the defining failures of early 2010's. i'm not sure how we failed to take something so close at hand, so available, so ready to go, to build more, to build further. but we all did, all of us who were around, interested parties: we did not seize that possibility, back when it was ready made for us to play with. one of the defining sadnesses of my life.

It sure would've been ideal to encourage those open standards, but one thing I've learned is that people bookmark for different reasons. Some just want to use it as short-term memory, while others use it more as a research index/tool. If you're more in the latter camp, the browser isn't necessarily the best designed tool to maintain your 80,000 bookmarks accrued over 10 years, even if they did have more open standards. So, sometimes you just want a system that more targeted to your use case and that "does one thing well". The nice thing about links is that there isn't any inherent reason why they need to be stored in the browser anyway.

But i take your point that it would've been nice to have your basic profile information be more easily shared/synced across applications; that would've been pretty cool.

You can still run your own Firefox sync server! See: https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncserver

I believe you can self-host Firefox's sync server.

I've been using floccus (https://floccus.org) for quite some time. It's a browser extension available for Chrome and FF that syncs bookmarks to a WebDAV server. I had the occasional sync conflict where I needed to re-initialise the sync, but it mostly just worked fine.

I've recently switched to using Safari more and to sync that, you'll sadly need a macOS running e.g. Synkmark (http://www.sheepsystems.com/products/).

Edit: I think the iCloud tools for Windows also can sync bookmarks between Safari and e.g. Firefox or Chrome.

Thank you for letting me know about Syncmark!

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