It's the best part of two years now since I dropped Pinboard in favour of Raindrop. It's also seven years now since I first created a Pinboard account and started collecting possibly-useful bookmarks1. I've found this process useful, and it continues to be a great way to find and remember things. The way it works these days is:
- Spend most of the week scrolling social networks, Reddit, the Orange Site, etc.
- See something I find interesting.
- Add it to the unsorted collection in Raindrop (mostly via the iOS app)
- Normally once a week fire up Braindrop and filter, edit, describe, and tag the links.
This approach gets used for a few different reasons:
- It lets me collect links I want to refer to in the future.
- It lets me collect links I want to review as a reminder to look at a thing.
- It lets me collect links to posts and articles I want to make a point of reading.
As such, I use it as both a long-term bookmark/information store as well as a read-it-later queue. It works well.
When going through this routine over the weekend, I got to thinking: while I do publish a public list of my bookmarks (complete with RSS feed), it might be interesting to make an occasional post where I list out the links I discovered, which I found interesting and worth hanging on to, and explain what caught my interest. It might also be a worthwhile process to look further through the past seven years of bookmarks and write about some of the older links (or at least use that occasional review to weed out the history).
So, that's the plan. I'm not sure quite how long it will last, but I think it would make for a good occasional series. I was going to call it "This week I found...", but then I realised that that puts pressure on me to make it a weekly thing. Perhaps it should be more like "Recently I found..."; that way it can either be multiple posts in a week, or once every few weeks.
I say "started collecting"; I was a del.icio.us user back in the day.ย โฉ
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