hosting a bookmarking instance

[sophia_sol]

Recently, out of frustration with the bookmarking sites available these days (rip delicious from long long ago, we still miss ye), I learned that it's possible to self-host a bookmark manager, and that Linkding, one such manager, seemed to have the features I need and be relatively easy to set up. And I like the idea of being able to control my own bookmarks like this, instead of depending on the whims of whoever owns the online service I'm using.

I'm a newbie to this kind of thing so I was intimidated going in, but last night I learned the magic of setting up one's own website using a vps, and I got an instance of linkding working on it and my bookmarks imported, and now I am hosting my very own personal bookmarking manager for all my many years of fannish bookmarks!

To get this done, I used the following instructions:

The "start a website" steps at https://landchad.net/

And then the linkding instructions here: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-own-bookmark-manager-with-linkding/

It definitely involved some moments of deep confusion, but I figured it out eventually, and I'm super happy with the result! You can see my public bookmarks here: https://linkding.aviansoph.com/bookmarks/shared

I'm not done playing around with it at this point. I would be interested in figuring out how to customize the appearance a bit more. Linkding does have a field for custom CSS within a user account, which works nicely, but the changes that creates only show for the user, rather than being site-wide for anyone viewing my bookmarks.

If anyone has suggestions (or detailed instructions!) of what I should be looking into in order to make my customizations more broadly applicable on my instance of linkding, I'd very much appreciate it, as I really don't know what I'm doing lol. I want to learn more about how to understand what I'm doing with this website stuff!

Comments

[luckyzukky]

great work! i don't have much advice but i host my own bookmarking service that has a similar pinboard-like interface, it's called espial, and you can see it in action here i use it all the time. these services are very useful!

for the custom css, the only advice i can offer is that maybe poking around with inspect element in your browser and then looking into the service's files and seeing if you can find the css file it's pulling from and then editing that? i've had luck with that on other services i host, though it's a little complicated and janky this way.

[sophia_sol]

nice, I had heard about espial as well but it seemed harder to get started with, which is why I went with linkding; yours looks great!

and thanks for the advice, I'll see what I can do with that!

[amalthia]

I had no idea it was possible to host your own bookmark manager! I had fun seeing what you'd setup and now I'm curious to see what it would take to setup one of my own in case Pinboard ever goes down/away.

[sophia_sol]

I didn't want to have to rely on pinboard anymore, which is why I went looking for other options. It took me about 3 hours to get my linkding set up to basic functionality last night from beginning to end, using the resources I linked above, and although there are costs involved with self-hosting it's not outrageous. So I do recommend it!

[yhlee]

Oh gosh, this is incredibly cool and I too have Worries about Pinboard. Thank you for posting this!

[vriddy]

That is so cool! I didn't realise self-hosting a bookmarking site was an option, this is really neat :)

[bluedreaming]

This is really neat!

I managed to botch up installing wiki.js with digital ocean so I’m a little sceptical of my ability 😭 but the GitHub mentioned some managed hosting options so I’m tentatively interested in that option!

I am curious about scale - how many bookmarks do you have? Do you mostly use them for recs/etc.? I’m eying my 25,513 bookmarks in raindrop that are basically just snippet of my brain and wondering how compatible that is.

(What I really need to self host is an airtable alternative…)

[satsuma]

That's so cool! I have pondered a self hosted bookmarking solution but it seems hard and I'm a bit intimidated 😅

Maybe if the current owner of satsu.ma really does let it expire next month I'll snag it and give it a shot.....

[biteshelter]

This is super cool! I like the usage of punctuation to sort your tags.

I'm not familiar with linkding and I haven't set up a Docker container in a while, but I poked around a bit to see how it manages global stylesheets. It looks like there's a "styles" folder of files that get compiled to CSS files (like this one on your site) in the static folder when you run the installation Dockerfile. Wherever you find the other static files, your stylesheets should be there as well.

If there's no official support for site-wide custom CSS, my best guess is that you could change the static files, although they'll probably be overwritten when you update/reinstall. If you wanted, you could try changing the installation script to use your own SCSS or folder of static files instead of installing new CSS. Linkding seems to use a persistent "data" folder (listed under "volumes" in the docker compose file) to store your bookmarks, so a persistent style folder would probably be similar.

I found file management confusing when I set stuff up on Docker, so I hope this information is helpful somehow ^^'

[silveradept]

Good to see that the project worked, and that it was something that did not take particularly long to get set up correctly and import your materials. Having more examples of successfully using and managing your own everything is good for people who feel intimidated about doing it themselves.