Bookmarking

Yesterday, I mentioned that I’ve been saving bookmarks with Raindrop. I’ve been saving bookmarks for over a decade. For me, it’s the only sensible way to remember anything I come across online. Effectively, I have created a personal subset of the web. Bookmarking is a better habit than dumping everything to a “read later” queue, since I’m not creating yet another inbox that I need to clear out later.

I switched to Raindrop last year after deciding not to renew my Pinboard subscription. The product is increasingly unstable and under-supported, and I became worried about it disappearing entirely. Dissatisfied at $22/year, I declined to renew my subscription and looked around for alternatives.

Bookmarking is a relatively straightforward problem, so fortunately there’s lots of options. Raindrop, a service with apps for macOS and iOS, was the most recommended. After creating my account, I was able to import all of my bookmarks from Pinboard. Raindrop has a generous free tier, so I haven’t even signed up for their paid plan. Much like Pinboard, it’s the work of a sole developer, so I’m hoping that it won’t meet the same fate by 2035.

Here’s some links I’ve recently saved:

1. HEX is a typography company founded by Nick Sherman. I discovered this through Erin Kissane, who used HEX’s MARGO to beautiful effect on their new site, wreckage/salvage.
2. Womp is a fascinating, browser-only 3D design tool. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I bookmarked it to explore later. I discovered this through Dense Discovery, a fanstastic weekly newletter.
3. A tutorial by Roland van Ipenburg on implementing the Atkinson dithering algorithm in HTML5 Canvas. Dithering is one of the unsung superpowers of low-energy computing; it’s a compression method that relies on our brains’ inferencing abilities for decompression.

I should stop here—I have so many more links to share, and they’d each shine as their own separate post. I even have more to say about each of the links I shared above!