Last year I dropped Pinboard as a bookmarking manager and instead rolled my own bookmarking application. Initially it worked well for me as all bookmarking apps have done, I was able to save bookmarks quickly and easily and move on. But there was still one problem, my bookmarks are in a seperate box from the rest of my day to day data, e.g. my journal and notebooks. It's been a problem with each bookmarking application I have used. How do consolidate them with the rest of my data?

Most of the bookmarks I have fall into one of two categories:

1. Long term value - Something that I will need to reference on a daily basis until I have it engrained into my workflow, so I will save it and frequently look it up until I have it engrained in my head or workflow.
2. Short term interest - A post or article on a new programming method, technology or framework. I will read the post and possibly take notes, but chances are I won't re-visit unless I am absolutely need to.

The second category comprises of the bulk of my current bookmarks. I've saved hundreds of bookmarks that I have rarely re-visited since I first saved them. So what's the point in even having them? Just in case? It's a waste to simply save them and not return to them. Why even save them at all?

In the last two weeks though, I've started a new strategy that involves three buckets for saving bookmarks.

The first bucket is a static page on my website. It's simply a collection of programming and development articles that I have found useful after I have read them. I'll also include a quote of the article and my own thoughts with it if needed. These type of articles tend to expire after a period of time just because programming languages are always changing, so I don't need to search back too far on them if needed.

The second bucket is a collection of files I am collecting together on different topics with really useful resources on them. Let's call them cheatsheets. I'm building these as pages on my website as well so that I can access on the go. Each page is a particular topic and listed on it are just a small collection of links. I'm trying to keep each one down to a maximum number of links but I haven't got to the stage where any of them are too big.

The last bucket is my journal. Anything else I find interesting gets saved in my Journalong journal. This process is made easier due to the fact that I can compose journal entries from Alfred and have them open in the Journalong new entry page so that I can just double check the entry and hit the submit button to save it. I am hoping to make this even easier to do in the future but it works for the moment.

This works a lot better for me as I have three files open on my desktop at all times.

1. This month's current journal file from Journalong
2. My programming and development notes file
3. A cheatsheet relating to the type of work I'm currently doing whether it admin work, a weekly review, programming or writing

As all of these files are markdown files, I use the Marked 2 app to preview them as nicely formatted HTML pages that make them much easier to read and interact with.

In the last week I've really noticed a change in how I think about the bookmarks that I save to these buckets. It has given me a chance to assess each bookmark now. Where as before I might have saved all the interesting stuff I found in my reading list and made an empty promise to look at them later, now I critique each page I read to see if it fits in one of the three buckets I mentioned above. If it doesn't fit in a bucket, I can discard it.

Now that I have specific places for bookmarks I want to keep, I don't need to bother about apps on my phone and iPad and bookmarklets or extensions for saving them. The biggest benefit though is that I'm done maintaining a database of bookmarks. Databases work well for lots of things, but I found it an increasing pain having a database of bookmarks that I never re-visited.

I'm done with bookmarking applications now.