What to do about bookmarks
Browser bookmarks frustrate me. I need them for personal and professional use. Yet, like email, bookmark management just seems like a silo wherein I pile new bookmarks on top of old. I try to remember what concise list of tags I used in the past. But it's all a guessing game. Eventually the number becomes so great I export them all to an XML file and put that in a different kind of silo on a hard drive.
My bookmarks, and I suspect most folks', can be split in to three groups. The stuff we use daily, the stuff we're currently using but one day (work projects for example), and the stuff we want to come back to someday.
The first and second groups are, IMHO, what the bookmarks store in a browser is for. I want quick access to these. It's important to keep the two separate and clear out the transient stuff appropriately. When I finish a job I should collate all the bookmarks I've stored for that job in a text file and add it to the git repository and tarball for the job.
I've helped reduce the third group by embracing Pocket. But I still have bookmark folders full of long-forgotten links.
I tried using Pinboard and Delicious but that's even worse. They're like cold storage. I put stuff there and fool myself it'll be there when I want it. But it's easier just to Google something than to try and search these services.
So what to do? I don't know. I like the idea of keeping all those third-group links in appropriately named text files. But will I bother to keep them updated? Will I bother to look in them when I need a link?
What I'm more tempted to do is distill anything I learn from a link in to a document. A tutorial in my own words. Anything else can go in Pocket or simply be read and discarded.