I've made the mistake many times through years.
Recently I've talked about the struggle of trying to keep up with too much content and manage it and I'm starting with shrinking my 21K bookmarks to a list of essentials resources, taking inspiration from this method for purging them.
I'm using my Gimli axe with the intent of getting rid of the whole problem. Here is my run book for the task.
- For every image, webcomic etc found in my bookmarks : save it on disk or forget.
- For every dead link, see if original content exists on https://web.archive.org or forget it.
- For every shortened link, go to https://urlex.org/ and expand them, then see if those are still worth.
- Yet about shortened link... ⚠️ NEVER use short links - Refuse to short link anything. Short links die. I've learned hardly to say goodbye to hundred of my bookmarks because the domains that served those links were long gone, but on some social media any link you share is converted automatically by the platform, this is hell. Fortunately you can probably find most of them via https://web.archive.org/ Best time to do it is now !
- For every YouTube video, if you don't remember why you, just forget it, or plan to watch it in your agenda. Don't add it to watch it later.
- For every link to tools, discussions, product release notes/changelogs, forums, issues, bugs, tutorials, except if those are very very special, they probably address problems for your past. Forget them.
- For every direct link to TV Show, movie, book pages, if you still consider consuming that content, get a copy of it, then forget about the link.
- For every link to a super tool / app / code snippet : install and use the app if still worth it, add the snippets to your favorites if still relevant, otherwise forget it. Tools change. Problems stay the same.
- For every link to a blog, newsfeed, either subscribe to the blog (RSS, Newsletter or Convert the newsletter to RSS, ...) or forget it.
- Important content will find you.
- You fill still find important content in the future.
- Try to keep only links to content that might be relevant years from now. If possible just backup those pages somewhere along with your other backups, so they do not disappear. But just in case, also archive them for others through https://web.archive.org.
- if a long article is worth keeping, why not taking some notes about it for later ? Or blogging about it ? Instead of just saving it for the eternity ?
- I'll continue this exercise and try to save all my important ones to /links and clean other places like my Git repo, my Wallabag, etc..
- If you don't take care of this, the obsolescence of the web is gonna taking care of that for you. I mean your favorite images, videos, sites, will long be gone by the time you read again those bookmarks.
- Have higher standards before bookmarking anything.