"kippt for Cross Computer Bookmarking" or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Kill the Bookmarks Bar"

kippt

My History with Bookmarking

Bookmarks have always plagued me.

Back in my Firefox days (a couple years ago) I used GMarks, but couldn't find a solid browser extension for them so I moved to XMarks and was happy with the seamless syncing for quite some time.

Then one day I got on a new computer and XMarks deleted all my bookmarks. Literally hundreds of Bookmarks organized like "Programming > Django > 'Foo Article'". Yes, I was able to get them back, but then it happened again, and again, and eventually I had enough.

Then I started using Chrome and everything was great. It's sync worked perfect until I started using multiple computers. Then it was the same story. I'm not sure what the logic is behind "sync" but for some reason I'd leave one computer and open Chrome in another and half my bookmarks would be missing. It seemed to happen randomly.

Finally I got sick of syncing completely and started turning off syncing on every computer's installation of Chrome.

It wasn't ideal, but dammit, my bookmarks weren't getting deleted!

What Changed

Recently I stumbled upon http://pineapple.io via reddit. I had seen things like this before (Delicious, etc.) but they never seemed intuitive enough. Pineapple.io was intuitive, but it was web-development specific and I quickly realized that sifting through my own bookmarks was a huge pain in the ass. I mean, you can't even sort your own bookmarks by date or any other standard sort method...

I was back in my Bookmark hell. A cluttered Bookmark Bar, unorganized and unable to share with my other computers...

I'm a big CSS framework explorer (I actually made one called Jeet). Well, while I was looking at Bootstrap's main page, I noticed some showcase sites at the bottom. I clicked on kippt's and I applauded that it used Bootstrap without looking like every Bootstrap site out there.

Funnily enough, this was months ago. I didn't give it a chance because I was so disenchanted with any type of Bookmarking tool that I just assumed it wasn't fully fleshed out and it'd be a pain in the ass to manage.

Implementation

Today I was looking at my Bookmars Bar and realized what a huge, unmanageable mess it was. I was about to start dumping bookmarks into folders but realized I couldn't port them around with me. This made me a sad panda.

I figured I'd give kippt a shot, and believe it or not, it's really fleshed out. Like... unbelievably so. It has integration with:

• Twitter
• Github
• Pocket
• Readability
• Buffer
• Instapaper
• Facebook
• Tumblr
• App.net

I don't even know what half of that crap is!

OMG and the tools! My god, the tools!

It has a tool for everything, including:

• Extensions for every browser
• iPhone app (Android love please!)
• Bookmarklets for everything
• Email addresses that save emails to kippt (how the hell?!)
• Google Reader

Naturally you can export your links.

Getting Organized

The best part is how you organize and share links via "Lists". Lists are basically bookmark folders that sit on a kippt server somewhere that you can make private or share publicly with a huge collection of notable names (Jeffrey Way, Paul Irish to name a few).

To get started, add the extension then go to any site. Click the extension button and the rest is completely self-explanatory. Personally I prefer lists to hash-tagging, but feel free to do either.

You can finally kill your entire Bookmarks bar, socially share beautifully organized lists of bookmarks, sync your bookmarks to the cloud, and never worry about stupid bookmarks again.

Finally someone got bookmarks right. Thanks kippt.