Bookie Features

Open source!

We’re big fans of Open Source development. Bookie is AGPL licensed and we encourage you to fork it from Github and try it out. Have a pet feature you’d love to work with? Then let us know. Jump into our IRC channel #bookie on freenode to chat with the other developers.

Importing bookmarks

At this time we support importing the Delicious and Google Bookmark exports. They’re just html files. The importer detects which format you’re got and will process them all in one swoop. It should run pretty quickly, though if you have over 5,000 bookmarks you might notice it taking a little bit to get through them.

When importing, make sure you enter the API key that is set in your installation’s .ini file. That’s the security measure that prevents others from importing into your Bookie installation. That key should be changed from the default.

Google Chrome extension

Most of the details are available over in the extension docs. Make sure that after you install it, that you go into the options to configure it to talk to your specific Bookie installation.

Firefox Extension

In the works, see the extension docs.

Bookmarklet

You can use a bookmarklet to save bookmarks from any other browser, including mobile browsers. Log into your account and you can get a copy/paste-able bookmarklet from your account page.

Fulltext indexing and seach

When you load bookmarks into the system they are put into a fulltext index that makes things very searchable. The description field, extended description, and the tags are put into this index.

If you have enabled the readable parsed version of your bookmarks then these are also available for search, however it’s a separate checkbox as it might make searches slightly slower.

These indexes are updated as you add and delete bookmarks and should make finding things much easier thank just looking for tags.

Readable cached copy of page content

Bookie now supports storing a cleaned version of the content of the page you just bookmarked. You can either enable it via the Chrome extension options or you can run the server side script provided in scripts/readability/existing.py to collect the page content. It’s not perfect, but in testing it provides a decent trimmed down version of the pages. This content is then indexed and made searchable. In the future we hope to use this to provide fast mobile viewing of your bookmarks and possibly even the ability to build ‘books’ of content that can be packaged together and turned into e-book material.

This is all very much inspired by Instapaper and Readability.

If you find pages of content that don’t work well please let us know and we can see if the code used to do the parsing can be tweaked to do a better job with your content.

Popularity Tracking

Every time a bookmark url is clicked on it’s tracked and counted. This allows us to provide a view of your bookmarks by popularity. We’re hoping this provides a very useful interface when we start working on our mobile views. In the future we might also be able to provide some analytics much like bit.ly does for shortened urls.

Multi database support

Bookie currently supports Sqlite, MySQL, and Postgresql as a storage backend. This includes all of the fulltext indexing and searching. Obviously, how each database performs these is a little bit different so you might find better luck with some backends over others.

Mobile Friendly

We’re working on making the website mobile friendly using responsive design techniques.