I was adding a bookmarklet to my web browser this morning (to auto-click on American Express offers) and was trying to figure out how to organize it so it’s easy to click when I want to find it. I realized that I have like a billion bookmarks that I’ve added to my bookmarks bar, etc, but I almost never directly use any of my bookmarks.

I figured I should clean out my browser bookmarks and organize them since it’s been a while since I’ve touched them. I realized that I haven’t really been adding bookmarks to anything, since I mostly just go to Reddit or a handful of other websites that just show me new stuff.

In our current fast paced world, I can’t even imagine reading something and then wanting to go back and read it again…

A few years ago I learned the keyboard shortcut for going directly to the address bar (CMD + L if you’re curious) and that’s also pretty much eliminated the need for me to use bookmarks, since it’s faster for me to just hit that shortcut and start typing. I also aliased all of my locally run apps that run on web servers, like homeassistant.local, for example, so I don’t need to use port numbers in urls, e.g. 10.0.0.1:8123.

So I started going through my bookmarks, and boy, are they old! A few are apartments in Seattle that I was thinking about moving into after I graduated from grad school (I moved into this one). There’s a syllabus to a class I took in grad school (the link broke). And hilariously there are also links to corporate intranet sites for multiple different companies that I worked for, including Microsoft, Amazon and Apple that I never bothered removing.

I also bookmarked a ton of articles about development. Things like how to implement in-app purchases in iOS, or customizing the UITabBar on iOS 5. Or the best way to start a Django project in 2012!

There are also a bunch of low carb keto recipes that I saved, a few of which I actually made and then highly regretted making.

I also have a bookmark to my friend Lorenzo’s blog which I’ll keep because it’s a good reminder to go check out his blog every now and then, and he’s another O.G. blogger like me!

I think it’s really interesting that bookmarks are a feature that has rarely changed in browsers. From Mosaic to… whatever the latest AI browser is these days, they’ve all had bookmarks, and the feature is probably 99% the same as it was 30+ years ago (aside from maybe the bookmark bar and bookmarklets).

It’s no wonder that I haven’t kept on top of pruning by bookmarks. Out of sight out of mind. I don’t really use them, so why would I need to clean them up?

I can think of a handful of uses for bookmarks in my current day use.

Use bookmarks as a hint

I can use bookmarks as a hint that I want the browser to autocomplete what I’m typing. I’m not sure how useful this is since I think browsers also just know that I go to a certain site every single day, but it’s probably somewhat useful.

Bookmarklets

This would probably be my main usecase, to run a bookmarklet to bypass a paywall by pulling up an archived version, or clicking all the offers on the Amex site, or cancelling all of my Amazon subscribe and save orders since I only do that to save 5% or whatever the first time I buy something.

Recipes

Recipes are maybe the only other thing I’d use bookmarks for since I want to go back to them, but in a somewhat random fashion, and I don’t know if I trust Google to remember what “Zucchini Cheese Enciladas recipe” means every time I type it (though they are pretty good at that). I’d probably be better off just saving the recipe somewhere or **gasp** printing it out, but whatever.

Bye Bye Bookmarks

I feel a bit bad removing a bunch of these bookmarks. But like Marie Kondo, I can acknowledge them, thank them for their service, and let them go. Plus I saved an archive somewhere of them anyway, in case I ever wanna look at them again!