My Favorites: How It Works
A bookmark is a bet that you will want something again. Most of those bets are wrong, which is why bookmark collections grow into thousands of links nobody ever opens — and why a small amount of discipline makes the difference between a tool and a landfill.
Why bookmark collections fail
Saving something feels like dealing with it. The action provides a small sense of completion, and the intention to return is rarely acted on. The result is a collection where finding anything is harder than searching the web again — at which point the collection has negative value.
Two things cause it: saving too much, and never removing anything.
What is worth saving
| Save | Do not save |
|---|---|
| Tools you use repeatedly | Articles you intend to read |
| Reference pages you consult | Anything findable by an obvious search |
| Deep links you could not find again | Homepages you can type from memory |
| Account and admin pages | Anything you are saving out of vague interest |
| Documentation for things you use | Pages saved to avoid deciding about them now |
The most useful distinction is between a bookmark and a reading list. A bookmark is something you return to repeatedly; an article you mean to read once is a task, and belongs somewhere with a completion state rather than in a permanent collection.
Organising
- A few broad folders, not a deep tree. Three to six top-level categories is usually enough.
- Name for retrieval. A page's own title is often useless — rename it to what you would search for.
- Keep the ten you use daily separate and immediately reachable; the rest can be searched.
- Do not tag exhaustively. Tagging systems that require discipline get abandoned within weeks.
Pruning
A twice-yearly pass through the collection, deleting anything you have not opened and cannot immediately justify, is what keeps it usable. Expect to remove most of it, which feels wasteful and is not — the value was in having saved it at the time, and that value has already been realised or lost.
Link rot makes this necessary anyway. A meaningful share of links break within a few years as sites reorganise, move or disappear, so an old collection is partly broken regardless of how well organised it was.
Saving the content, not the link
For anything you genuinely need to keep, the link is not enough. Pages change, disappear and go behind paywalls. Options depending on how much it matters: save a copy of the page, print to PDF, quote the passage you needed into your own notes, or record the archive link alongside the original.
Copying the sentence that mattered into your own notes is often more useful than the whole page, because it captures why you saved it — which is the thing you will have forgotten.
Where these are stored
Favourites saved here live in your browser on this device. Nothing is transmitted and nobody else can see them. They will not sync to other devices, and clearing your browser's site data removes them — so for anything you cannot afford to lose, keep a copy elsewhere.