Keeping Browser Bookmarks in Obsidian is Actually a Pretty Smart Move

How a Markdown list of links can help preserve your personal map of the internet

Image by Author

Bookmarks! They keep our place in both physical and digital books, and beam us to specific needles in the internet haystack. But are these carefully curated maps of the labyrinth as efficiently and reliably stored as we think they are?

I organised the life out of my browser bookmarks recently, and felt justifiably proud of myself when I was done. It’s the same satisfaction you get when the junk drawer (the one you always go to for a piece of string or that missing screw) is finally divided and conquered.

So what was the nagging feeling in the back of my mind, whispering that perhaps all was not well in the orderly streets of bookmarkdom?

🔔 Ding !

It’s the plain text thing. Of course!

It’s what I keep evangelising, after all: the whole own-your-data and make it future proof spiel. That, and the inordinately helpful flexibility to add your own notes to a link or group of links.

Tags are helpful, but they can’t replace the ability to write a brief note next to a collection of links

All the regular contenders let you export/import and back up your lists of sites, which is great, but none that I’ve seen let you add notes to individual bookmarks in a way that works for me. Tags are helpful, but they can’t replace the ability to write a brief note next to a collection of links.

Read on to discover why I decided to recreate all my browser bookmarks in one plain text file, and how I went about doing it.

This rare capture of the glitch goblin caught in the act of messing with your bookmarks, courtesy of the Author

Armor-up against the glitch goblin

Now let’s just say that I’m wrong, and notes are (or become) available in online bookmark managers. Okay, nice! But why am I still not convinced? For the same reason I started keeping a list of all my contacts in plain text.

You just never know when the glitch goblin will pay you a visit.

It happened to me last year, when the details of several contacts became scrambled. My second daughter was now apparently both of my sons, at the same time. Not a difficult thing to re-enter the correct info, but it was an unwelcome distraction from the flow of my day and shook my confidence in the rest of the information in Contacts. 

If that could happen in a stock Apple app, I shudder to think what else might go wrong with information I’m trusting to everyday, supposedly trustworthy apps.

Instant sorting of the weeds from the seeds

Copying all of my bookmarks into Obsidian made it easy to separate the weeds from the seeds. The laborious nature of the exercise was, surprisingly, one of the most valuable things about it! It’s a lot of work to move house (and moving bookmarks felt a teeny bit like that), so you don’t want to have to pack and carry 50 boxes of detritus down the stairs.

Chuck it, and you don’t have to move it.

Moving my bookmarks helped me to quickly identify which were valuable, and which were hanging around from old projects. The irrelevant, the forgotten, and the just-in-casers were left behind.

Creating a bookmark file in Obsidian

Simple is best, in my opinion, but you’ll have to decide what that will look like for you. Simple doesn’t mean uncomfortably lean; the right kind of simple is what’s left after you’ve removed everything that doesn’t support what you value most.

Version 1

My first iteration relied on Markdown and Obsidian’s outline pane to navigate sections. It was my attempt to recreate the spaces I’d built in the Arc browser.

At the top was a horizontal list of my most used links, using emojis as aliases to save space. After that I had several # H1 sections corresponding to the main areas of my life, followed by some ## H2 subsections. Emojis help with quickly finding the links I’m looking for.

Screenshot by Author

Something I love about organising my bookmarks this way is the way web links can live alongside links to apps and files on my computer. Hookmark is invaluable for generating the latter.

You can get Hookmark on its own, or as part of a Setapp subscription. That’s an affiliate link because while I don’t generally love subscriptions, I love Setapp. Using my link gives you 1 month free to see if it’ll be good value for you. Here’s an article I wrote about some other Setapp apps I’m partial to.

Version 2

I’ve recently reorganised my bookmarks into a Kanban board, to see if it works better for me than the linear format of version 1. It’s too soon to tell, but so far I like it.

the right kind of simple is what’s left after you’ve removed everything that doesn’t support what you value most

To create a Kanban you’ll need to download and enable the Kanban Community Plugin. I love how Kanbans in Obsidian are just some plugin magic worked on what looks like a simple task list. You can create your boards in Markdown then view as a Kanban, or type directly into the Kanban visual interface generated by the plugin.

Screenshot by Author

I’ve set a hotkey to toggle between Kanban and Markdown modes. It’s easy to move items up and down with hotkeys in Markdown mode, but Kanban mode is naturally the better choice when it comes to moving freely in and between lists.

Tell me why you’re doing all that double-handling, again?

First off, once it’s set up there’s not a lot of double-handling involved.

As for the why bother question, I’m seeing a pattern of helpful double-handling in other areas of my life, so I know it’s another case of the manual way being a good fit for me.

• I keep my tasks in a plain text TaskPaper file, and manually enter them onto my daily to do list or calendar — and feel so much more on top of what’s on my plate than I did when using a more automated system

• I run our household and business budget in YNAB, without automated bank feeds (this feature isn’t available in Australia), and find that entering transactions manually keeps me mindful of our overall financial situation

It’s not a case of automation = bad, manual entry = good. Not at all. I’m more than happy to use a dishwasher and a washing machine, and their metaphorical equivalents. These three areas (tasks, budgets, and bookmarks), however, are ones where I find it helpful to keep a more hands-on approach.

So, no more in-browser bookmarks now?

Honestly, I have to say that I access my bookmarks in Arc more often than from my Browser Bookmark file in Obsidian. No, that doesn’t mean I consider creating a Markdown version a waste of time. I still (mostly) keep it updated as my in-browser bookmarks change.

I like the feeling of security that comes from having a backup (and backups of my backups!), so this kind of double-handling is something that comes naturally to me. It keeps my bookmarks lean, and is a great resource when I need more context around a topic. It’s also a convenient way to access related files and apps that can’t be stored as easily in my browser.

There is a way to add local links to my list of bookmarks in Arc (and in other browsers), but not to add the kind of contextual information I like to keep in my master Markdown file.

Something I love about Arc, and which makes it work beautifully in conjuction with a Markdown list of links, is their Air Traffic Control feature. You can specify which workspace (and therefore which profile) you want specific links to open in. This means that whenever I open my YNAB budget from my browser bookmarks in Obsidian, I know it will go straight to my finance workspace, where I’m already logged in to that site.

I have a few invite links to give away for Arc. No promises, but you can DM me on Mastodon if you’d like one. 

However you bookmark, remember to back them up!

The aim of this article is not to convince you to copy my method of storing and accessing your browser bookmarks, but simply to be more mindful about the quality, quantity, and security of the way you keep them.

I think you’ll agree that waking up to a blank browser would almost certainly put a spanner in your workflow. So whether you create a Markdown version of your browser bookmarks or not, I hope you’ll take this article as a prompt to at least backup your current bookmarking system.

Export them today, if you haven’t done so already. And set a reminder or create an automation so it gets done regularly, and you can rest safe in the knowledge that no glitch goblin will ever be able to hijack your own personal map of the internet.

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