Bookmarks don’t scale for managing tools
The problem was that my bookmarks were no longer useful.
Not because there wasn’t any good software out there, but simply because I could not find what I needed amongst the mess of saved links that I no longer looked at. It had all become this heap of “maybe helpful in the future” bookmarked pages that would never see the light of day again.
I realized that software differs in nature from other types of content: You do not read it only once but repeatedly. However, it gets stored similarly to texts, i.e., flat and unstructured in a folder full of bookmarks.
Lately, I’ve been trying to think about storing software more like apps: by purpose and with ease of access in mind. The idea is similar to creating your own personalized app layer for the web (like https://unstore.io ).
It is a small change but one that cuts down on research and jumping back-and-forth considerably.
I wonder what others’ approaches are here. Do you still use bookmarks, or have you switched to something else?
I actually went in the opposite direction and decided to keep using browser bookmarks.
I had a very similar problem: the bookmarks themselves weren't the issue, retrieval was. I had everything organized into folders, but once those folders got large, finding something still meant opening them and scrolling through long lists.
That's what eventually led me to build Bookmash. Instead of moving the links into another system, it works directly with the existing Chrome or Firefox bookmark tree and gives me a better way to search and navigate it.
I like keeping the browser as the source of truth because there's no second library to maintain or migrate to.
So for me the answer ended up being: keep bookmarks, change the way I interact with them.
That distinction between software and things you read once is useful. A folder works when you already know what you’re looking for, but it falls apart when all you remember is “that tool that cleaned up screenshots.”
Full disclosure: I’m building Nodus Vault around that retrieval problem. It saves the readable page content with the link, so you can search by the idea you remember instead of the original title. A small Daily Check also brings a few forgotten links back into view.
It’s paid after a 7-day trial and it doesn’t create a public app-store-style layer, so it may not match your whole workflow. But for the “I know I saved this somewhere” moment, it might be useful.
When you go looking again, do you usually remember the job the tool did or the project you needed it for?