Complete: Onedimension links

Last month I built a system for collecting and categorizing links.

It follows the same convention as onedimension.net, where the primary location data is stored is local to my machine. There’s an ephemeral “short term” store in the cloud using Cloudflare’s KV service, so I can add links from any device through a simple page only I can access. Then I pull down those links and store them locally by category, and finally build a static webpage that mirrors them online at links.onedimension.net.

As I was playing around with the system and using it for a few days, it was clear that it wasn’t really that useful to me. The act of copying over a website and adding categories I found to be a bit of a hassle, and more often than not just moved on from a page unless there was something distinctly interesting about it. The key was that the active part of this system was too demanding, when instead it should have been a passive experience of saving links in the background and providing the scaffolding to find them again.

Given this system took about four or five hours to throw together, I’d say it was most certainly worth it for what I learned. I feel like I have a much clearer sense of what needs to be built in the space of retrieval in the context of web browsing.