Chrome extension

Users may wish to keep a private reading list for many reasons. I wanted to be able to maintain a reading list in a trusted location that was not a social bookmarking site. This problem is particularly challenging because finding a way to synchronise data securely using already trusted locations without sending them to another existing platform also meant developing that as well.

As a personal project, I am the only designer and developer. I designed the user experience and created the visual design. I designed and developed it primarily for myself. As I already have access to a private cloud service that supports syncing bookmarks, it made sense to look at a way to sync them with my bookmarks.

This project started because I wanted a better way of storing bookmarks that I found as I dove down rabbit holes doing research. I wanted to have them available on multiple devices. I didn’t want them to be synced to a social bookmarking site as these can be blocked in the workplace. My goals for this project included being able to do basic management of a batch of links, such as add, edit, delete, and file in a bookmarks folder. But I also didn’t want them cluttering the root of the bookmarks folder or the bookmarks bar.

By adding them to a particular folder, I was able to elevate the folder to a place that was easily accessible – the folder managed by the extension popup – while being synced with bookmarks. Context menus allow for bookmarking as well as copying the information to be easily referenced in other documents.

Future work on this project will include user research to make it more widely applicable to a general audience, as well as promoting it. This extension is available on the chrome web store.