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christian
christian
christian christian
Dec 23, 2021 @ 1:15 AM
December

December: A system for storing links

I need to figure out some sort of system for storing and retrieving links I come across.

Right now I'll keep the links open in tabs and eventually close them out. If I ever need to re-find something, I'll open up the browser history and search, which more often than not fails. Probably because the only thing that gets indexed in browser history is the urls, while I'll be trying to search by concept or something like that. I also keep a log of some links on Futureland, but the problem here is the same—the only thing I can search through is the urls. This system works slightly better because I've usually made more of an effort to explore the page at the link if I've dropped it in the journal and am therefore somewhat more likely to remember it naturally.

A tab I had open for a while was this site called stumblingon, which sends you to random handmade websites. There's something about this I think makes sense for this link system; randomly re-discovering a site you once knew seems like a good way of reactivating an old pattern in your mind.

It seems like this link organizational system is something that a ton of people have tried to make, or have written about. The reason many fail, in my view at least, is that how you organize links is unique to your own brain. The sorts of categories you use can't be predetermined; they must be decided by you and maintained by you to ensure the connections between concept and links are strong. As a result, this software most likely works best when you make it yourself and it fits your own mental model of how things should be stored and retrieved. There's definitely principles that could be used to generalize this beyond a personal system, but as a start I think it makes the most sense to build something myself. Of course.