I’m always collecting interesting sites, interactions, articles — basically whatever captures my curiosity on a given day.
Because of that, I tend to end up with a ton of bookmarks, but never really have a decent place to house and categorize them. I could just dump them in a browser, but I find they always lack some basic organization options.
I wanted a solution that gave me a tagging feature, avoiding getting locked into a paid subscription (I was close to using mymind), and has the ability to make certain bookmarks public facing.
That’s when I stumbled on linkding.
How it works
I have a little Synology NAS tucked away in a shelf in my home that I use primarily for backups, and as a media server. linkding is a simple little self-hosted application I can run in a docker container, link it to domain, secure it with CloudFlare tunnel, and within a few minutes I was up and running.
They’ve made a little browser extension as well, so adding something to my library is done in a click. There are options to add tags to the bookmark, make it private or public, as well as the option to include a note so I can remember why I bookmarked it in the first place.
Why make them public?
This feature came in handy last week, when I was chatting with another designer about what sites I use to collect design inspiration. I had started bookmarking some of my favorite sites under a “gallery” tag, and was able to link him directly to my full list, instead of sending them over manually.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the solution. If I had it my way, I’d be making some UI tweaks to make it a bit more in line with my taste, but hey, done is better than perfect.
4 Comments
I really resonate with your nature “I’m always collecting interesting sites, interactions, articles — basically whatever captures my curiosity on a given day.”
I’ve been using are.na for saving visual bookmarks and also building https://urlist.xyz/ for capturing more casual links and lists that I might share with others.
Nice! I love are.na, but I typically just use it to find product design inspo. I always like seeing people building their own tools, kudos.
“I was close to using mymind”
Me too! mymind it’s great, too bad it doesn’t have public feature.
Since you are already familiar with self hosting maybe I can recommend Hoarder.app it’s very similar to Raindrop, bookmark with thumbnail instead of just list view.
I was debating between this one as well. I ended up going with linkding because of the simple list view, but the overall design of hoarder is definitely nicer.