RECOMMENDED: Shaarli, Stakali, and Your Cloud Bookmarks

This is a little more in-depth than when I told you about Joplin, but it is so worth it.

Because aside from your notes, your bookmarks are one of the more important resources you have. However, bookmark management on your browser is probably clunky and a PITA. And even if you sync them via Mozilla Sync or Chrome’s login feature, that you might have to sign in on a computer you don’t know (or trust).

Enter online bookmarking. Delicious and other sites have tried to make it work, but have closed down, become less accessible (lookin’ at you, Pinterest), or otherwise made things more difficult.

Shaarli is a self-hosted FOSS solution.

With clear documentation, the hardest part of setting up Shaarli is getting a webserver to put it on. Drop the files in a directory, go to that page and do the setup script, and you’re in business. You can search, tag, and otherwise keep track to your heart’s content. And if you don’t mark the links private, you can do it from any browser without even logging in.

One of the best things? You can add a specialized search (in Firefox or Chrome) so searching your bookmarks is super easy.

There aren’t a lot of other themes that are still current; probably because the two shipped with it are pretty good on their own. But if you’d like to dress it up a little, the Material theme that Kalvn created is very eye-catching.

Integration with your existing workflow is easy, with plugins for Firefox and Chrome, and apps for Android (two, in fact) and iOS.

I heartily recommend Stakali for the Android crowd. It not only stores the bookmarks locally (so you can still get to them in case your instance goes offline), but displays them in a very aesthetically pleasing way.

There is one big important note I need to make, though. During setup, you must set up your host properly. I copy and pasted a configuration file, and had a heck of a result.

I could log in normally, and one app (that logged in) could work just fine. But when I tried Stakali with the API code, I kept getting 404 errors.

I was banging my head against the wall until I decided to double-check everything, and realized that I should have RTFM. Right there in the server configuration part of the documentation are the directory options:

    <Directory /absolute/path/to/shaarli/>
        #Required for .htaccess support
        AllowOverride All
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all

        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews #TODO is Indexes/Multiviews required?

        # Optional - required for playvideos plugin
        #Header set Content-Security-Policy "script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://www.youtube.com https://s.ytimg.com 'unsafe-eval'"
    </Directory>

Once I added that into my configuration file for Apache, everything worked right again.

Of course, I added that page to my own shaarli.

I recommend Shaarli and Stakali. Finding that bookmark will never be the same.