Org-mode as a replacement for delicious (bookmark management)

[Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at>]

Hi!

  <summary>
  I am disappointed by delicious and thinking of an Org-mode
  replacement which offers similar featureset.
  </summary>

As a long-term user of delicious.com, I loved the old delicious -
the one before Yahoo! sent it into «sunset»: storing bookmarks with
tags (and a decent tag completion mechanism), having great browser
plugins, having a usable Android client, providing some tag farming
mechanism (tag renaming, merging tags, deleting tags), having a good
search function, offering public RSS feeds for the whole set or
combinations of tags.

Using Memacs[2] (RSS module) I was able to bring my bookmarks back
into Org-mode.

Since last year delicious provided me more and more services I do
not need/want and - even worse - stopped or modified features I used
to use. Performance went down as well.

Before I try and switch to direct competitors such as
http://diigo.com I am thinking of a possible solution using
Org-mode. Besides the obvious disadvantages of loosing public RSS
feeds (at least out-of-the-box), it has advantages as well: complete
self-hosted service, not depending on the business strategy of a
web company, integration into my Org-mode universe, one (external)
technology less to worry about.

-> Is there someone using Org-mode for bookmark-management which is
   comparable to delicious?

Oh, I am absolutely sure that there are a bunch of people just
storing URLs in one bookmarks.org or similar. To avoid
misunderstanding: I want more than this :-)

My requirements and possible Org-mode solutions:


* Storing bookmarks from browsers (me: Chrome)

org-protocol.el[1] seems promising. And also [2] is quite
interesting. But unfortunately those still lack advanced support for
tagging: I would have to send the URL to Emacs Org-mode, switch from
browser to Emacs, jump to the most recently added entry, go into
tagging mode, add tags (having Org-mode tag completion), exit
tagging mode. This means a lot of additional steps to my current
situation. 

I am not happy about those additional steps.


* Storing bookmarks with Android

Mobile-org Android[3] is great but its share/capture mechanism does
not offer good tag support. Especially tag completion is missing.

So far, there does not seem to be a cool replacement for the more or
less good delicious Android apps.


* Tag farming (renaming, merging, deleting, ... tags)

Although I have to admit that I am adding lots of tags, I seldom
used tag-based searches/queries yet. But so far I can see, tag
farming is no problem since basic Emacs features provide RegEx
search and replace and so forth.

No big problem here.


* Search function within bookmarks

Standard Emacs search methods, sparse trees, RegEx, ... quite a win
on the Emacs/Org-mode side ;-)


* Public RSS; Social Web Methods

Well there could be a RSS feed exporter for Org-mode as well in
future. Or an external script can parse CREATED-properties and
generate a feed out of the most recent 20 items. Should not be too
complex to do for example using Python as well.

Although I really do like this delicious feature, I could live
without it I guess.


* MISC

Did I miss something which might be of interest for a bookmark
manager?


  1. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-protocol.html
  2. http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-annotation-helper.html
  3. https://github.com/matburt/mobileorg-android/wiki/
  2. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs
-- 
Karl Voit