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

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

[Karl Voit]

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

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

[Rafael]

Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:

> * 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.

I think you can save some steps here. You can define the capture
template in such a way that, immediately after switching from the
browser to Emacs, you can add tags with C-c C-q to the filled captured
template before sending it away with C-c C-c. I do not understand what
you mean by "tagging mode".

Best regards,

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

[Karl Voit]

* Rafael <rvf0068@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think you can save some steps here. You can define the capture
> template in such a way that, immediately after switching from the
> browser to Emacs, you can add tags with C-c C-q to the filled captured
> template before sending it away with C-c C-c. I do not understand what
> you mean by "tagging mode".

Oh, cool.

I always were using C-c C-c in the heading line to add tags. But
this does not work during capturing. Thanks for that hint!

-- 
Karl Voit

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

[Samuel Wales]

Hi Karl,

On 6/23/12, Karl Voit <devnull@karl-voit.at> wrote:
> Did I miss something which might be of interest for a bookmark
> manager?

I like it.  Just in case it is of interest, here are some related ideas:

This is in the same approximate area as an annotation mechanism,
org-fstree, PUA, IPA, Fireforg, persistent marks, Emacs bookmarks, W3M
Antenna, Org registry, reverse link search, tangling and detangling,
and ID markers, including IDs on anything and unbreakable
bidirectional links.

What if we unified some of these concepts?  We have it work for every
Org link type.

Org entries can be anywhere in your Org files.  They contain the
canonical annotation for something.  Nothing fancy.

We could bounce back and forth between the thing and the Org entry
when the thing is viewable in Emacs.

Suppose you are viewing a source code file.  There is a unique marker
in a comment or a docstring.  Then find-file-hooks discovers the
unique place in Org that matches that marker.  The mode line shows a *
to tell you that there is an annotation there (more precisely, at
least one).  A command bounces back and forth between Org and the
marker point is nearest.

You can comment the code this way -- privately and with the full power of Org.

===

Or suppose you are reading a long Org entry, and you want to mark
where you stopped reading.  You could put a mark there and jump to it,
and it will be a bidirectional link with the place that annotates it.

If you are in a read-only source code file or something else like an
info page, you can't put a mark there, but there are other ways to do
a reverse link.

We could even do caching, diffing, etc. if we decided to get really
fancy.  Let's update our links and color them by whether they have
changed.  Where were you in the Emacs NEWS file?  Are some of your
links broken?  Do you have duplicate links that need to be put in a
canonical entry?  Did anybody update that web page?  How was that
remote file changed recently?  Clicking on the link does a diff and
updates the local cache.  You can even use the cache when you are
offline.

Just a bunch of possibilities.

There are some discussions of some of these ideas on this mailing list.

Samuel

-- 
The Kafka Pandemic: http://thekafkapandemic.blogspot.com