There’s a lot to gain from documenting and curating what you’ve been reading. It makes you remarkably more intentional about the things you read. Secondly, it’s great to revisit things you found cool and re-evaluating them.

It’s one of the reasons why I started the garden.

The way I’m organizing my bookmarks is to optimize for those two feelings. Intentionality and the feeling of surprise when you revisit the things you found worth saving.

I lose a lot of links, they’re often lost in random chats and my browser history. I want to minimize searching in both those places. I also want to ensure that if I’m searching for some link in these two places, then they’re probably worth putting in a place I can quickly revisit.

I have used a lot of apps over the years. Instapaper, Omnivore (rip), Obsidan, Notion, Joplin and even a plaintext bookmarks.txt file.

I found Raindrop around 2022, I remember thinking it was a bit overkill for my use case, which was just for reading good articles and filing them away.

I came back to it recently because I wanted a better ‘bookmarks’ app and that’s exactly what Raindrop purports to be. It also has a generous free tier and a pro plan that I can probably justify to myself with enough heavy use.

I’m planning to have a hybrid system where I share all articles to Instapaper and then if they’re worth keeping I use Raindrop. Instapaper would act as a buffer to allow me to read articles and have something ready to go offline when I need something good to read.

The other cool part of using Raindrop is saving bookmarks is as easy as sharing the link to the Raindrop app on mobile and Ctrl+Alt+O on desktop. It supports highlighting too if it can parse the article.

Here’s the flat working structure that I’m using to organize my links.

code/
design/
fun/
gems/
ideas/
makers/

I’ve given up all hope of ever being able to adopt a generic system, as appealing as something like PARA is… I don’t think that’s the right approach for this. This structure is an active reflection of the things I’m prioritizing.

These are my top level views into the things I read. I don’t fully like that there’s an entire folder named ‘ideas’ but I can’t think of anything better as of now.

On tags: I fear they have a chance of cluttering up my search queries. The strategy I’m going to use is to save into these folders and then tag afterwards. Tag in hindsight rather than pre-emptively.

I want to unify the garden and what I do with Raindrop. I plan to slowly integrate the things I save with Raindrop and on the garden. Raindrop has a great API, which is great to fetch all link data and my personal notes about that link. This way, Raindrop acts as a singular source of truth and I don’t have to update a .md file constantly.

Another missing piece is that it’s not as easy to save book highlights as well. It would seem all roads lead to Readwise

I’m not sure how long this is going to last, but the good thing is it’s easy to migrate out of Raindrop, if I end up having special enough needs that I build up my own solution or find another tool more suitable for my use case. Regardless of the app, the motivation for me has never changed.

I love preserving the links I find cool and useful. It’s a small way of containing the infinite wealth of information out there on the internet. I have found it very important to have my own personal archive of great links to revisit.