Overthinking Bookmarks

For as long as I’ve been browsing Hacker News, I’ve had this habit of saving links. You know how it goes — you spot an interesting post, tell yourself you’ll read it properly later, and toss it into whatever system you’re using at the time. For me, that started with Brian Lovin’s Daily Top Stories Newsletter. Every day, I’d skim the links, pick the ones that caught my eye, and drop them into Obsidian — my personal note-taking app of choice.

At first, this worked fine. Obsidian is great for stashing thoughts and links, but the collection grew faster than I expected. Before long, it felt less like a helpful list and more like a digital junk drawer. That’s when I started tinkering. I built a little personal bookmarks page — nothing fancy, just a static list on my site. But of course, once you have a page, you start obsessing over it: changing the theme, the layout, the way the links are grouped. The more I adjusted it, the less I actually used it.

Eventually, I thought: maybe I should treat these links more like a blog — post them as monthly collections, like my Web Discoveries series. That felt smarter. But even then, the same problem came back: I was saving links for the sake of saving them, not actually revisiting them. The system was still broken, just dressed up differently.

So I tried to patch the bookmarks page again — this time adding features like a search bar, hoping it’d make the whole thing more useful. And for a short while, it did. I’d revisit the page, play around with it, but the excitement never lasted. The truth was pretty clear: I was spending more time building and tweaking the system than actually using it.

That’s when I stumbled on Linkding — a self-hosted, open-source bookmarking tool. Minimalist, but packed with exactly what I needed: easy link saving, solid search, tags, notes, and even self-hosting under my own domain. No more reinventing the wheel. The moment I set it up, the stress around managing bookmarks just… stopped. For the first time, it actually felt like my bookmarks were useful — not just a pile of forgotten links.

So that’s how I ended up here. After all the hacks, tweaks, and dead-ends, it turns out the solution wasn’t to build another system, but to find one that was already built — and let it do its job.