6 ms·

Show HN: Link Drop – Daily newsletter of your bookmarks

188 points by frindo 7y ago

frindo 7y ago
Hi HN - I built this to satisfy a personal itch and learn more about chrome extensions. I always felt like I would set and forget bookmarks so I wanted a way to be reminded of them daily. That, combined me with my love of newsletters, led me to create linkdrop. Thanks for checking it out!
- bracobama 7y ago
  Cool idea! Do you think you could extend the intervals it sends out emails? I, for one, would really appreciate being able to have a weekly digest of links that I could check out on the weekend instead of a daily email.
  - frindo 7y ago
    I wanted to add that but I didn't have time this weekend. That's actually my biggest feature request from myself :P. I'm super busy over the next couple weeks, but I'll see what I can do to add this, maybe even just a hard coded "Send this only on Friday." Thanks for checking it out!
- jsilence 7y ago
  Nice Idea. I'm using Zotero with the FF addon as a bookmarker and subscribed to the RSS-feed in telegram via bot. This way everyone in my workgroup gets notified about new bookmarks.
kickscondor 7y ago
Discussion about a similar idea yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954307
- frindo 7y ago
  Whoa I missed this. Will check it out thanks!
janvdberg 7y ago
So this tool emails NEW content/articles from the saved bookmarks? Sort of RSS in newsletter form. Pretty cool idea.
- frindo 7y ago
  Oh no it actually just sends whatever hte link is that you bookmarked. Sorry for the confusion! What you described is actually a _really_ cool idea though haha.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    I think reminding ourselves of old things can be quite a good thing in some cases. I think your idea is a _really_ cool idea.
    - ljm 7y ago
      Agreed. So many things languish in my bookmarks and RSS reader. I won’t find them unless I know exactly the right words for them to be suggested. I won’t find them even if I’m trying to (had this problem finding the WildDuck post last week). A periodical check in sounds amazing. “Are you still curious? Y/n”
akavel 7y ago
Bookmarked. ...ummm...
onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
I've wanted something like this for years. Thanks for making it [=
itake 7y ago
This would be cool if it linked with Pocket. I like to book mark articles for later viewing on desktop.
- frindo 7y ago
  My initial plan was to integrate with Pocket (which I love). I have some ideas for how that would be done. Building this was more about learning how to build a chrome extension, but I think this might work even better as a tool on top of pocket. Given the interest this is getting + the other conversation about bookmarks I might take on the Pocket+ thing next. Thanks for checking it out!
  - akavel 7y ago
    Super cool idea. For my personal use, I'd love if it worked slightly differently, i.e. had the following (additional?) features: - let me press a button in my browser ("lottery" or "Russian roulette") and just open a random link (from my bookmarks) immediately in the current tab; I'm not interested in emails, but I'm interested in getting inspired sometimes, exactly when I want it and how much I want it :) - if it could also load bookmarks/favourites from HN & lobste.rs - as other said, working on Firefox :)
- bentossell 7y ago
  yeah I do it with pocket (mentioned in another comment) - makes it super simple!
- asdff 7y ago
  reread.io sends some random unread articles from your pocket as a newsletter
jason_zig 7y ago
I really like simple tools like these. I forget what I bookmark all the time and IMO the chrome bookmarks bar is hard to manage... Nice work & great idea! Small nitpick: The fields for sign up and create account are the same and should carry over if you switch between the two. For example I entered my email & pass to log in but mean to sign up and had to enter the info twice.
- frindo 7y ago
  Interesting, the default behavior is for it to carry over but I thought that was weird so I clear the inputs when you switch between the two. I can see how that is annoying since they look so similar.
pcardoso 7y ago
Nice work, I can see myself using this. I have some ideas in this field and while I don't execute on them this looks like a good option. :D Congratulations!
anilyeni 7y ago
hmm. it is not something i would use as person. but i would prefer to use this one as SaaS. Something like, some people are using my mobile app, getting interested with some products, i would popup and ask them "do you want me to email you the links, so you can better see the products later in your desktop"
shehryarrr 7y ago
Oh nice! I was thinking something like this would be useful the other day.
dmazin 7y ago
Cool. Would be great if this allowed import of Chrome/Instapaper/Pocket bookmarks, since I have massive backlogs there.
- bentossell 7y ago
  I use Pocket and wrote in a separate comment how to use that.
- asdff 7y ago
  reread.io is similar for pocket
  - dmazin 7y ago
    Exactly what I was asking for! Thank you.
- marcinem 7y ago
  Check https://mailist.app https://mailist.app :)
monadi 7y ago
That's a really cool approach - I am operating in a similar space [1] but I have not introduced any rediscovery options like that yet. [1] https://www.randoku.co/ https://www.randoku.co/
- fastball 7y ago
  Your product looks fairly similar in scope to Pinboard[0] – what would you say differentiates the two? 0: https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
  - monadi 7y ago
    At its' current state Randoku mirrors Pinboard's features to a certain extent, but I'd like it to be much more than an archiving solution. I'm working on introducing "read it later" features (à la Pocket/Instapaper), annotations, discovery of relevant content via RSS and re-discovery of content already bookmarked (which is what I liked about Link Drop).
    - lgats 7y ago
      Are any of these services able to ping archive.org with the bookmarked URL?
      - monadi 7y ago
        Randoku does not do that at the moment - I could potentially extend my parser to keep a copy of the closest archived snapshot url from the archive.org public API. I will explore this - thanks
bentossell 7y ago
I made a tutorial for something like this recently which you can use the Pocket extension with (https://www.makerpad.co/make/newsletter-generator-chrome-extension https://www.makerpad.co/make/newsletter-generator-chrome-ext...) and the newsletter tutorial is here (https://www.makerpad.co/pro/automated-weekly-hourly-email-digest https://www.makerpad.co/pro/automated-weekly-hourly-email-di...) but it's paywalled. But you just set up zapier to link new bookmarks to airtable, then use the digest zapier trigger to weekly/daily send a list of all the new links sent to airtable via gmail or the zapier email action. You can also link this with Mailchimp for a bigger newsletter too (which is in the paywalled tutorial)
arendtio 7y ago
Nice idea, would love to see an example on the page (e.g. screenshot).
- frindo 7y ago
  Yeah I probably need to redo the landing page. There are a few more example screenshots on the chrome extension page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-drop/bdfpcaniedneocakpdjdpilpeinifnni https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-drop/bdfpcani... Thanks for the feedback!
ytwombly 7y ago
I hope you're considering a Firefox add-on next!
- frindo 7y ago
  If I had known the response this would get I wouldn't have launched without it! I'll look into it over the next couple weeks. :)
  - meremortals 7y ago
    Fantastic work! I would also very much love a Firefox extension
eat_veggies 7y ago
Really nice. I remember a previous show HN based on the same concept: https://mailist.app/ https://mailist.app/
CameronBanga 7y ago
Saving for when Safari support is added. One idea for an integration would be with Pinboard. I use read later on pinboard, and would love to have those sent to me this way.
jaysonelliot 7y ago
This is the best approach to bookmarking I've seen yet. I manage a multi-author blog, and I've tried lots of different ways to share story ideas with the authors. This provides an easy way to send out the day's reading. Whatever revenue model you need to make this viable long-term, I hope it works out. I'd gladly pay a subscription price for this service.
- frindo 7y ago
  Hey thanks so much for your comment! I'm glad you find this tool helpful. If you have a minute, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how I could improve it further. My email is in my profile. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!
jaden 7y ago
This is a great idea! Any plans for a bookmarklet to get multi-browser support?
- frindo 7y ago
  Hmm that's interesting. I'm not very familiar with bookmarklets. Could I sync and persist a uid so that I can store the bookmarks per user?
  - jaden 7y ago
    You could generate a custom bookmarklet for users with their uid embedded in it.
    - frindo 7y ago
      Cool - I'll check out how portable the code from chrome extension to firefox/safari extension is. This could be a quick work around if needed. Thanks!
frankdenbow 7y ago
reminds me of http://getrevue.co http://getrevue.co which uses an extension to make it easier to create newsletters to send to others
_eric 7y ago
Great idea! I love me some newsletter too, so this should be pretty handy. Minor nitpick: There's a type in the /about page: > I want to change the time I recieve (->receive) my drop
- frindo 7y ago
  Ugh thank you for catching that. Will fix in the next push.
- plibither8 7y ago
  Ironic nitpick: the intended word "typo" in your comment has a typo
  - _eric 7y ago
    Oh, the irony
superconformist 7y ago
Now that's what I call really simple syndication!
marcinem 7y ago
Good job! Have you seen https://mailist.app https://mailist.app before? Ot’s pretty the same:) I built it a year ago.
- frindo 7y ago
  Hey thanks! I've never seen mailist before. I probably wouldn't have built this if I had haha.
zorbash 7y ago
We at https://tefter.io https://tefter.io are working on an alternative way to discover new content and organise bookmarks. We started off with a similar idea to linkdrop but then thought there's more to bookmarking than that. So a user may subscribe to a variety of feeds and users, https://tefter.io/~hackernews https://tefter.io/~hackernews is of course one of them and have a personalised newsfeed. From the newsfeed posts can be bookmarked and kept in a "weekend reads" list. Bookmarks can be marked as read. However bookmarks can be easily added from any devise, since we offer browser extensions, mobile and desktop apps, slack integration. One can also import from pocket or pinboard. Concerning newsletters, we thought they may be annoying. Imagine waking up on a Sunday to an email telling you to read stuff. We're trying to stay in the spirit of HN, sending as little notifications as possible. Our users have better things to do and their attention is important.
rareutilities 7y ago
anyone looking to host there own solution https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/ https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/

188 points by frindo 7y ago

Hi HN - I built this to satisfy a personal itch and learn more about chrome extensions. I always felt like I would set and forget bookmarks so I wanted a way to be reminded of them daily. That, combined me with my love of newsletters, led me to create linkdrop. Thanks for checking it out!

bracobama 7y ago
Cool idea! Do you think you could extend the intervals it sends out emails? I, for one, would really appreciate being able to have a weekly digest of links that I could check out on the weekend instead of a daily email.
- frindo 7y ago
  I wanted to add that but I didn't have time this weekend. That's actually my biggest feature request from myself :P. I'm super busy over the next couple weeks, but I'll see what I can do to add this, maybe even just a hard coded "Send this only on Friday." Thanks for checking it out!
jsilence 7y ago
Nice Idea. I'm using Zotero with the FF addon as a bookmarker and subscribed to the RSS-feed in telegram via bot. This way everyone in my workgroup gets notified about new bookmarks.

kickscondor 7y ago

Discussion about a similar idea yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954307 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19954307

frindo 7y ago
Whoa I missed this. Will check it out thanks!

janvdberg 7y ago

So this tool emails NEW content/articles from the saved bookmarks? Sort of RSS in newsletter form. Pretty cool idea.

frindo 7y ago
Oh no it actually just sends whatever hte link is that you bookmarked. Sorry for the confusion! What you described is actually a _really_ cool idea though haha.
- mettamage 7y ago
  I think reminding ourselves of old things can be quite a good thing in some cases. I think your idea is a _really_ cool idea.
  - ljm 7y ago
    Agreed. So many things languish in my bookmarks and RSS reader. I won’t find them unless I know exactly the right words for them to be suggested. I won’t find them even if I’m trying to (had this problem finding the WildDuck post last week). A periodical check in sounds amazing. “Are you still curious? Y/n”

akavel 7y ago

Bookmarked. ...ummm...

onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago

I've wanted something like this for years. Thanks for making it [=

itake 7y ago

This would be cool if it linked with Pocket. I like to book mark articles for later viewing on desktop.

frindo 7y ago
My initial plan was to integrate with Pocket (which I love). I have some ideas for how that would be done. Building this was more about learning how to build a chrome extension, but I think this might work even better as a tool on top of pocket. Given the interest this is getting + the other conversation about bookmarks I might take on the Pocket+ thing next. Thanks for checking it out!
- akavel 7y ago
  Super cool idea. For my personal use, I'd love if it worked slightly differently, i.e. had the following (additional?) features: - let me press a button in my browser ("lottery" or "Russian roulette") and just open a random link (from my bookmarks) immediately in the current tab; I'm not interested in emails, but I'm interested in getting inspired sometimes, exactly when I want it and how much I want it :) - if it could also load bookmarks/favourites from HN & lobste.rs - as other said, working on Firefox :)
bentossell 7y ago
yeah I do it with pocket (mentioned in another comment) - makes it super simple!
asdff 7y ago
reread.io sends some random unread articles from your pocket as a newsletter

jason_zig 7y ago

I really like simple tools like these. I forget what I bookmark all the time and IMO the chrome bookmarks bar is hard to manage... Nice work & great idea! Small nitpick: The fields for sign up and create account are the same and should carry over if you switch between the two. For example I entered my email & pass to log in but mean to sign up and had to enter the info twice.

frindo 7y ago
Interesting, the default behavior is for it to carry over but I thought that was weird so I clear the inputs when you switch between the two. I can see how that is annoying since they look so similar.

pcardoso 7y ago

Nice work, I can see myself using this. I have some ideas in this field and while I don't execute on them this looks like a good option. :D Congratulations!

anilyeni 7y ago

hmm. it is not something i would use as person. but i would prefer to use this one as SaaS. Something like, some people are using my mobile app, getting interested with some products, i would popup and ask them "do you want me to email you the links, so you can better see the products later in your desktop"

shehryarrr 7y ago

Oh nice! I was thinking something like this would be useful the other day.

dmazin 7y ago

Cool. Would be great if this allowed import of Chrome/Instapaper/Pocket bookmarks, since I have massive backlogs there.

bentossell 7y ago
I use Pocket and wrote in a separate comment how to use that.
asdff 7y ago
reread.io is similar for pocket
- dmazin 7y ago
  Exactly what I was asking for! Thank you.
marcinem 7y ago
Check https://mailist.app https://mailist.app :)

monadi 7y ago

That's a really cool approach - I am operating in a similar space [1] but I have not introduced any rediscovery options like that yet. [1] https://www.randoku.co/ https://www.randoku.co/

fastball 7y ago
Your product looks fairly similar in scope to Pinboard[0] – what would you say differentiates the two? 0: https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/
- monadi 7y ago
  At its' current state Randoku mirrors Pinboard's features to a certain extent, but I'd like it to be much more than an archiving solution. I'm working on introducing "read it later" features (à la Pocket/Instapaper), annotations, discovery of relevant content via RSS and re-discovery of content already bookmarked (which is what I liked about Link Drop).
  - lgats 7y ago
    Are any of these services able to ping archive.org with the bookmarked URL?
    - monadi 7y ago
      Randoku does not do that at the moment - I could potentially extend my parser to keep a copy of the closest archived snapshot url from the archive.org public API. I will explore this - thanks

bentossell 7y ago

I made a tutorial for something like this recently which you can use the Pocket extension with (https://www.makerpad.co/make/newsletter-generator-chrome-extension https://www.makerpad.co/make/newsletter-generator-chrome-ext...) and the newsletter tutorial is here (https://www.makerpad.co/pro/automated-weekly-hourly-email-digest https://www.makerpad.co/pro/automated-weekly-hourly-email-di...) but it's paywalled. But you just set up zapier to link new bookmarks to airtable, then use the digest zapier trigger to weekly/daily send a list of all the new links sent to airtable via gmail or the zapier email action. You can also link this with Mailchimp for a bigger newsletter too (which is in the paywalled tutorial)

arendtio 7y ago

Nice idea, would love to see an example on the page (e.g. screenshot).

frindo 7y ago
Yeah I probably need to redo the landing page. There are a few more example screenshots on the chrome extension page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-drop/bdfpcaniedneocakpdjdpilpeinifnni https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/link-drop/bdfpcani... Thanks for the feedback!

ytwombly 7y ago

I hope you're considering a Firefox add-on next!

frindo 7y ago
If I had known the response this would get I wouldn't have launched without it! I'll look into it over the next couple weeks. :)
- meremortals 7y ago
  Fantastic work! I would also very much love a Firefox extension

eat_veggies 7y ago

Really nice. I remember a previous show HN based on the same concept: https://mailist.app/ https://mailist.app/

CameronBanga 7y ago

Saving for when Safari support is added. One idea for an integration would be with Pinboard. I use read later on pinboard, and would love to have those sent to me this way.

jaysonelliot 7y ago

This is the best approach to bookmarking I've seen yet. I manage a multi-author blog, and I've tried lots of different ways to share story ideas with the authors. This provides an easy way to send out the day's reading. Whatever revenue model you need to make this viable long-term, I hope it works out. I'd gladly pay a subscription price for this service.

frindo 7y ago
Hey thanks so much for your comment! I'm glad you find this tool helpful. If you have a minute, I'd love to hear your thoughts on how I could improve it further. My email is in my profile. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

jaden 7y ago

This is a great idea! Any plans for a bookmarklet to get multi-browser support?

frindo 7y ago
Hmm that's interesting. I'm not very familiar with bookmarklets. Could I sync and persist a uid so that I can store the bookmarks per user?
- jaden 7y ago
  You could generate a custom bookmarklet for users with their uid embedded in it.
  - frindo 7y ago
    Cool - I'll check out how portable the code from chrome extension to firefox/safari extension is. This could be a quick work around if needed. Thanks!

frankdenbow 7y ago

reminds me of http://getrevue.co http://getrevue.co which uses an extension to make it easier to create newsletters to send to others

_eric 7y ago

Great idea! I love me some newsletter too, so this should be pretty handy. Minor nitpick: There's a type in the /about page: > I want to change the time I recieve (->receive) my drop

frindo 7y ago
Ugh thank you for catching that. Will fix in the next push.
plibither8 7y ago
Ironic nitpick: the intended word "typo" in your comment has a typo
- _eric 7y ago
  Oh, the irony

superconformist 7y ago

Now that's what I call really simple syndication!

marcinem 7y ago

Good job! Have you seen https://mailist.app https://mailist.app before? Ot’s pretty the same:) I built it a year ago.

frindo 7y ago
Hey thanks! I've never seen mailist before. I probably wouldn't have built this if I had haha.

zorbash 7y ago

We at https://tefter.io https://tefter.io are working on an alternative way to discover new content and organise bookmarks. We started off with a similar idea to linkdrop but then thought there's more to bookmarking than that. So a user may subscribe to a variety of feeds and users, https://tefter.io/~hackernews https://tefter.io/~hackernews is of course one of them and have a personalised newsfeed. From the newsfeed posts can be bookmarked and kept in a "weekend reads" list. Bookmarks can be marked as read. However bookmarks can be easily added from any devise, since we offer browser extensions, mobile and desktop apps, slack integration. One can also import from pocket or pinboard. Concerning newsletters, we thought they may be annoying. Imagine waking up on a Sunday to an email telling you to read stuff. We're trying to stay in the spirit of HN, sending as little notifications as possible. Our users have better things to do and their attention is important.

rareutilities 7y ago

anyone looking to host there own solution https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/ https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli/