A while back I started scratching an itch that I had and that wasn't relieved by some existing software or services I could find: a central place to keep track of interesting places on the web I wanted to follow up on, without having them saved as read-later in Pocket (which is an excellent tool, but I'd like to keep it for articles only).

One of the requirements was that I should be able to easily add some URL from my phone, so I can remember it for when I have more time or a bigger screen to research something or watch a video. Also, it needed to be cross-browser, preferably environment agnostic. That ruled out the various bookmark syncing systems of the respective browsers, also because I tend to use Firefox on the desktop and Chrome or Flyperlink on my mobile devices.

A web application seemed like a good fit, so I started on a Flask based website with peewee as uncomplicated ORM. To make it all look good, I used MaterializeCSS which is a great toolkit to create Google Material style websites (I also use it on aquariusoft.org for example). As backend, instead of choosing a 'big' database management system like MariaDB or PostgreSQL, I decided that peewee would store its models in a SQLite file.

This all resulted in a project that is quite portable: after creating a virtualenv and filling it with the requirements, one is already able to run the web app by just running python digimarks.py, which will run Flask's debug server, but that's fine for the casual use that a bookmarking system gets. The frontend is fully responsive, so looks just fine on a phone screen and big desktop monitor.

Of course, running it under nginx/uwsgi or Apache/mod_wsgi in a central location is a bit more useful, so for myself I did just that.

While toying around with the functionality after having implemented automatic retrieval of the title of the linked page, tags and stars/favourites were among the first to go in. I would want to find things easily by having relevant labels attached to the bookmarks, and if I especially liked something, a star can be added. Filtering on these, along with search for text makes it easy to find things again.

As I now have tagging, and occasionally want to share research with friends and other people, I decided to make it easy to create a read-only view of a certain tag, where the bookmark cards are available for review by whoever you share the (private-ish) url with, but do not disclose any other information about them, like the other tags attached, 'star' status, or edit possibility. An example is my list of useful Python resources.

All of this is open sourced on its own GitHub page, so check it out if you're interested. Installation instructions are included (you can either pip install it, or clone the project and go from there). An aquariusoft.org project page is online too, with currently slightly outdated screenshots.