Browser bookmarks work as long as you use one browser on one computer. As soon as the phone, the work laptop and the tablet come into play, the list fragments and useful links get lost. There is also a second, less visible problem: pages disappear. An article saved years ago may no longer exist when you need it. Hosting a bookmark manager and a read-later service at home solves both. Two widely used free projects are linkding and Wallabag, which cover different needs.
Two different needs
It is worth distinguishing two ways of saving things from the outset:
- Bookmarks: links to find again in the future, organised with tags and descriptions. Technical documentation, tools, shops, resources. You save many links and consult few of them, but at the right moment.
- Read later: articles you want to read calmly, often just once. What matters is clean text, reading on the phone and being able to do so offline.
linkding is designed for the first need, Wallabag for the second. You can use both, or only the one you need.
linkding: essential bookmarks
linkding is deliberately minimal: a fast interface, effective search and few frills. It installs from a lightweight container image and uses SQLite.
The features that are useful in practice:
- Tags: assigned when saving, they allow quick filtering. Keep them few and consistent, for example
linux,recipes,home,work. - Browser extension: one click saves the current page with title and description already filled in.
- Sharing: some bookmarks can be made visible to other users of the instance.
- Archiving: linkding can save a copy of the page as a single HTML file and, alternatively, request archiving from the Internet Archive. This is the defence against disappearing links.
- Import and export in the HTML bookmark format, which almost every browser and service can read.
If you are starting from years of untidy bookmarks, the advice is to import everything into a dedicated tag, such as to-sort, and tidy it up a little at a time instead of freezing in front of the job.
Wallabag: reading at leisure
Wallabag is a read-later service. When you save an article, Wallabag downloads the page, extracts the main text and images, and discards adverts, menus and annoying pop-ups. The result is a clean version, readable in the same style on every device.
Its distinctive features:
- Apps for Android and iOS that synchronise articles and allow offline reading, handy on a train or plane.
- Export of articles to formats such as EPUB and PDF, to read on an e-reader.
- Tags, favourites and archive, to separate what is still to read from what you have already read.
- Highlights and annotations on the text.
- Automatic tagging rules, for example based on the domain or the estimated reading time.
Wallabag needs somewhat more resources than linkding and, with several users, a database such as PostgreSQL or MySQL; for personal use SQLite is enough.
Which to choose
| Need | linkding | Wallabag |
|---|---|---|
| Finding resources in the future | Excellent | Possible, but not its purpose |
| Reading long articles | Limited | Excellent |
| Offline reading on the phone | No | Yes, with the apps |
| Permanent copy of pages | Yes, with archiving | Yes, the text is saved |
| Resources required | Very low | Low to medium |
In my own use I keep both: linkding for everything that is reference material, Wallabag for articles to read at the weekend.
Saving from the phone
The moment you find something interesting is often on your phone. Both services integrate with the share menu: Wallabag through its app, linkding through third-party apps or by adding its page to the home screen. The gesture has to be quick, otherwise you end up going back to old habits.
Access and privacy
Bookmarks and reading lists say a lot about a person: interests, worries, plans. Keeping them at home is precisely why people choose self-hosting. If you want to save from your phone while you are out, you need secure remote access, preferably through a VPN. For its apps, Wallabag uses a system of clients and tokens separate from the password, so you can revoke the authorisation of a lost device without changing credentials everywhere.
In short
- Bookmarks and read-later are different needs, served by different tools.
- linkding is minimal and fast, and can archive pages against disappearing links.
- Wallabag cleans up articles and makes them readable offline, with EPUB export.
- A few consistent tags are worth more than an elaborate structure.
- Access from outside only through secure channels, with revocable tokens for devices.
