Very intriguing tool that brings bookmarks to life in Chrome with a time travel element. There is a lot to be said for the plugin as is.
Some thoughts:
- Have you thought about some type of timeline view with a clickable element that has a size dependent on the number of bookmarks for the day? When you click on that day it displays the sites you bookmarked on that day along with the top 2-3 words from each site in some type of auto-sorting word cloud?
- On the flip side, what if you had a word cloud generated from all of your bookmarks where if you click on a specific word, it shows your interest in that topic over time?
- Looking forward in time, what if the plugin could make recommendations for sites you might want to visit in the future based on the sites that you have already bookmarked? Sort of like a personalized Digg whose recommendations would change based on what you bookmarked in the last 30 days?
- Along similar lines is there a way to comb through the browser history and spot specific pages that have been visited multiple times in the past and recommend to the user that they be bookmarked to save a search engine visit, etc?
- It seems like the plugin is checking to see if the bookmark is live. Any possibility that in case of linkrot that it could suggest the bookmark be edited to point to one of the various archive sites out there that has a live snapshot of the site?
I got rid of it for this version because it made the UI lag, but I'll try to optimize it and bring it back.
If you're thinking of an app that has a timeline similar to the one you're describing, I'd like to see it for inspiration!
> along with the top 2-3 words from each site in some type of auto-sorting word cloud
> what if you had a word cloud generated from all of your bookmarks where if you click on a specific word, it shows your interest in that topic over time?
I've been thinking of using some kind of AI to classify bookmarks into categories, I think that could be a lot more useful than the traditional "folder" view, but I think it would be hard to make a word cloud work though, since words have different meanings depending on context, and some websites like GitHub put the website name in every page title, the results would not be very useful.
> what if the plugin could make recommendations for sites you might want to visit in the future based on the sites that you have already bookmarked? Sort of like a personalized Digg whose recommendations would change based on what you bookmarked in the last 30 days?
I love this idea and it's definitely something that's coming up!
> is there a way to comb through the browser history and spot specific pages that have been visited multiple times in the past and recommend to the user that they be bookmarked to save a search engine visit, etc?
Absolutely. I've even made a prototype of Rewind based on your browser history instead of your bookmarks, it was too cluttered to be useful but I think your suggestion would be perfect, I'll try it.
> Any possibility that in case of linkrot that it could suggest the bookmark be edited to point to one of the various archive sites out there that has a live snapshot of the site?
Absolutely. The menu items / smart actions that appear for bookmarks already depend on context so that's another very good idea, thanks!
I'd like to go further and make the menu items completely customizable for power users, but that's not a priority.
At the top you can see a timeline view with vertical intensity bars that can be clicked to go into a specific date range. I could see a possibility where instead of the number of snapshots of a site, it would be the number of bookmarks in the date range.
They also do something interesting with their day display just below. Instead of changing opacity the size of the bubbles around the dates expand based on the number of snapshots. In the case of bookmarks, I would think it should be possible to calculate the size of the bubbles once, and only recalculate if a bookmark gets deleted. Hopefully this would keep the GUI responsive.
Rewind is a Chrome extension that groups bookmarks by creation date. So on July 4, you will only see bookmarks created on a 4th of July (2022, 2021 and so on). It's very useful when you have thousands of bookmarks you saved over the years to read them later (and never do).
It also displays thumbnails, has a fast search feature, and a lot of quick actions for curating your bookmarks, like fetching up-to-date titles and urls (canonical urls, technically), showing which links don't return 200, finding comments on Twitter about your bookmarks, searching the title on Google (which is great for finding mirrors), etc.
I created Rewind in 2015, it has 920 users at the time of writing, it's totally free, it's just a side project I'm really proud of.
I re-wrote it from scratch to use Mantine for the UI and XState as a state library and I'm very happy with this stack. It's my first time using either.
I've converted an earlier version to Firefox a couple of years ago, and afaik the process for Safari is similar, it only takes a few changes, replacing "chrome" with "browser" in the source code mainly.
But maintenance-wise, that's another story, it means submitting every new version to both stores, updating descriptions, screenshots etc, which takes a sizeable amount of time, and providing support for users, which is harder since I don't use Safari personally, which is why I focus on Chrome.
I ran into similar challenges w/ bookmarks: namely, being able to navigate them differently / more visually. It doesn't have the date-centered approach, but I use it daily to access bookmarks quickly (Command+Shift+K), and search/browse through them visually :)
Very intriguing tool that brings bookmarks to life in Chrome with a time travel element. There is a lot to be said for the plugin as is.
Some thoughts:
- Have you thought about some type of timeline view with a clickable element that has a size dependent on the number of bookmarks for the day? When you click on that day it displays the sites you bookmarked on that day along with the top 2-3 words from each site in some type of auto-sorting word cloud?
- On the flip side, what if you had a word cloud generated from all of your bookmarks where if you click on a specific word, it shows your interest in that topic over time?
- Looking forward in time, what if the plugin could make recommendations for sites you might want to visit in the future based on the sites that you have already bookmarked? Sort of like a personalized Digg whose recommendations would change based on what you bookmarked in the last 30 days?
- Along similar lines is there a way to comb through the browser history and spot specific pages that have been visited multiple times in the past and recommend to the user that they be bookmarked to save a search engine visit, etc?
- It seems like the plugin is checking to see if the bookmark is live. Any possibility that in case of linkrot that it could suggest the bookmark be edited to point to one of the various archive sites out there that has a live snapshot of the site?
Thank you for the feedback, that's very inspiring!
> Have you thought about some type of timeline view with a clickable element that has a size dependent on the number of bookmarks for the day?
In the previous versions, I used the calendar as a heatmap, each day has a background opacity relative to the number of bookmarks for that day.
You can see an example here: https://rewind.netlify.app/static/1f4ab98cd13454fb9fed7adaeb...
I got rid of it for this version because it made the UI lag, but I'll try to optimize it and bring it back.
If you're thinking of an app that has a timeline similar to the one you're describing, I'd like to see it for inspiration!
> along with the top 2-3 words from each site in some type of auto-sorting word cloud > what if you had a word cloud generated from all of your bookmarks where if you click on a specific word, it shows your interest in that topic over time?
I've been thinking of using some kind of AI to classify bookmarks into categories, I think that could be a lot more useful than the traditional "folder" view, but I think it would be hard to make a word cloud work though, since words have different meanings depending on context, and some websites like GitHub put the website name in every page title, the results would not be very useful.
> what if the plugin could make recommendations for sites you might want to visit in the future based on the sites that you have already bookmarked? Sort of like a personalized Digg whose recommendations would change based on what you bookmarked in the last 30 days?
I love this idea and it's definitely something that's coming up!
> is there a way to comb through the browser history and spot specific pages that have been visited multiple times in the past and recommend to the user that they be bookmarked to save a search engine visit, etc?
Absolutely. I've even made a prototype of Rewind based on your browser history instead of your bookmarks, it was too cluttered to be useful but I think your suggestion would be perfect, I'll try it.
> Any possibility that in case of linkrot that it could suggest the bookmark be edited to point to one of the various archive sites out there that has a live snapshot of the site?
Absolutely. The menu items / smart actions that appear for bookmarks already depend on context so that's another very good idea, thanks!
I'd like to go further and make the menu items completely customizable for power users, but that's not a priority.
Thanks again for your precious feedback!
> If you're thinking of an app that has a timeline similar to the one you're describing, I'd like to see it for inspiration!
I should have mentioned this earlier but I was thinking of archive.org's calendar view. Example: https://web.archive.org/web/20220000000000*/cnn.com
At the top you can see a timeline view with vertical intensity bars that can be clicked to go into a specific date range. I could see a possibility where instead of the number of snapshots of a site, it would be the number of bookmarks in the date range.
They also do something interesting with their day display just below. Instead of changing opacity the size of the bubbles around the dates expand based on the number of snapshots. In the case of bookmarks, I would think it should be possible to calculate the size of the bubbles once, and only recalculate if a bookmark gets deleted. Hopefully this would keep the GUI responsive.
Thank you again for building this!
Rewind is a Chrome extension that groups bookmarks by creation date. So on July 4, you will only see bookmarks created on a 4th of July (2022, 2021 and so on). It's very useful when you have thousands of bookmarks you saved over the years to read them later (and never do).
It also displays thumbnails, has a fast search feature, and a lot of quick actions for curating your bookmarks, like fetching up-to-date titles and urls (canonical urls, technically), showing which links don't return 200, finding comments on Twitter about your bookmarks, searching the title on Google (which is great for finding mirrors), etc.
I created Rewind in 2015, it has 920 users at the time of writing, it's totally free, it's just a side project I'm really proud of.
I re-wrote it from scratch to use Mantine for the UI and XState as a state library and I'm very happy with this stack. It's my first time using either.
Cool! Have you ever looked into creating a Safari version? If so, any thoughts on whether Apple's Safari extensions mechanisms would work for Rewind?
I've converted an earlier version to Firefox a couple of years ago, and afaik the process for Safari is similar, it only takes a few changes, replacing "chrome" with "browser" in the source code mainly.
But maintenance-wise, that's another story, it means submitting every new version to both stores, updating descriptions, screenshots etc, which takes a sizeable amount of time, and providing support for users, which is harder since I don't use Safari personally, which is why I focus on Chrome.
Awesome service! Will include something I built recently called Bookee: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookee-instant-boo...
I ran into similar challenges w/ bookmarks: namely, being able to navigate them differently / more visually. It doesn't have the date-centered approach, but I use it daily to access bookmarks quickly (Command+Shift+K), and search/browse through them visually :)