Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots

Posted by mstef 4/14/2025

Omnom: Self-hosted bookmarking with searchable, wysiwyg snapshots(omnom.zone)

a bit of background. this is a rewrite of omnom by asciimoo - the guy who also made searx. originally i wrote omnom, back in the days when del.icio.us was enshittified and gone down the drain. instead of complaining i was taking the opportunity to write a replacement that i would want, it became omnom, and for many years me and a bunch of users were very happy with it.

but the fast moving world of browser extensions made maintenance (for a non-commercial free software side project) too expensive, so the extension support became erratic, until it died completely. for a year or two i didn't use it.

but then asked asciimo if he could have a look a the extensions (since he was recently working on another extension, so had some experience), he looked at it, and rewrote the whole thing in go and fixed the extension. he even got support from nlnet/ngi0.

if you want to have your own self-hosted libre software bookmarking service for you and your community, give it a go, it's very simple, privacy respecting and most robust when it comes to snapshotting. asciimoo did a great job.

214 points | 59 commentspage 2

marcod 4/14/2025|

> if you want to have your own self-hosted libre software bookmarking service for you and your community, give it a go

I haven't worked with go - where could I host that myself?

Could I do this with the free tier of https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/quickstarts/build-and-depl...

Snuupy 4/18/2025||

Do any of these bookmarking apps support adding urls in bulk from currently open windows/tabs?

I often have windows of hundreds of tabs open that I'd like to archive and close but raindrop has been the only one that has been able to get rid of my clutter.

bosse 4/14/2025||

I've been using Wallabag for articles I want to deal with later, with the Frigoligo app on iOS for offline reading. For bookmarks, I've been using the Floccus extension with the Nextcloud Bookmarks app.

I'm missing the social aspect of bookmarks on del.icio.us though, so I'll check out Omnom and the other mentions in this thread of what people are using.

vandyswa 4/14/2025||

I have a static web page with a table of A href's. Source controlled under git. Problem solved.

mstef 4/14/2025|

sure, for bookmarking that's fine. but it does not help against linkrot, or censorship, or pages changing with time.

quantadev 4/14/2025||

I agree. Saving web-links is a solved problem. Saving the CONTENT afaik is not solved and I've wanted a solution for YEARS, as well as the rest of humanity has needed this (including those who don't even know they need it, haha!).

Closest thing would be to "print" to PDF but that always creates a trainwreck in the PDF and is never good enough for me. Looking forward to trying Omnom if it's open source.

asciimoo 4/14/2025||

It's not only open source, it is free software. Take a look at https://github.com/asciimoo/omnom - suggestions/contributions are appreciated =)

quantadev 4/14/2025||

That looks like a pretty heavy-weight solution, with a lot of complexity, and I don't mean that as a criticism at all. I'm not a 'go' developer myself. I've always wanted a pure JS solution (as a browser extension, maximum of 200 lines of code) that can capture the content of a web page (doing a virtual scroll to the bottom, to capture the whole page). Since there's no perfect way to translate HTML to PDF, my idea had always been to capture the IMAGE of the page (aside from capturing keywords for DB indexing which can be done separately just for 'search' support later on).

The fly in the ointment is of course the scrolling too, because some apps have "infinite" scrolling, and so in many SPAs there's literally no such thing as "The whole page". Anway, I haven't tried your app yet, because of not-JS and not-Small, reasons, but I'm just sharing my perspective on this topic. Thanks for sharing your project!

Ametrin 4/16/2025||

I recently released a Chrome extension that converts webpages to PDF. It's free, but you need to register to get a key. Unfortunately, this solution isn't client-side JavaScript; I'm using an API underneath. To be honest, I mainly created it to promote the API, but if it's useful for people, I might develop it further. Perhaps it could be useful to you in some way. I don't know your requirements, but maybe with this base in the form of this extension, it wouldn't be difficult to add something that meets your expectations, let me know. However, if you want to export a PDF from Ahrefs, for example, I'm afraid that might not be possible; currently, only basic authentication is supported. Unless maybe I could add an option like in my API to pass JavaScript code, but I also doubt that would work because Ahrefs probably has some bot protection.

edit: i forgot the link https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/pdfbolt-web-to-pdf/...

quantadev 4/17/2025||

Thanks for sharing that. Looks pretty nice!

submeta 4/14/2025||

I created something like that for my spouse and myself. An app that creates an archive.ph url, extracts full text and generates summaries via an llm. I‘d open source it, but as I also extract paid articles via archive.ph, I think it wouldn’t be ethical to publish it.

mstef 4/14/2025|

the difference is, that archive.ph snapshots something in headless. omnom snapshots the exact same state that your browser is displaying you. so if there is js interactions that change the dom, those will be snapshotted, unlike with archive.ph.

also lets not forget that archive.ph wraps everything in their own frame and has their own way of mangling the result. not in a bad way, it's just not the original as it would have been rendered in your browser.

viraptor 4/14/2025||

Archive.ph is often used, because the "js interactions that change the dom" is typically a paywall. And you won't want it.

mstef 4/14/2025|||

omnom is for snapshotting, not for circumventing paywalls. i'm merely comparing the snapshot feature of the two projects. circumventing paywalls is out of scope.

your bookmarks will never linkrot away.

mstef 4/14/2025|||

btw it is perfectly fine to circumvent a paywall with archive.ph and then to snapshot it with omnon so your bookmark never linkrots away. also when i say "js manipulation" i also mean stuff like captchas, or dynamic documents that you change by interacting with it, or even private services like e.g. rocket chat hidden behind some barrier like http auth, or private vpn. archive.ph will never have access to what your browser might have access to.

fullsort 4/15/2025||

Take a look at our creation which is free. Also, you may try Full Sort's demo without sign up to see if you like the interface and features. https://fullsort.com

dpcx 4/15/2025||

Is there anything like omnom or karakeep that allows for storing things without having to manually bookmark or add them to the system? I want any URL I hit to have its content sent to my service so that I can search it later.

rcarmo 4/15/2025||

I use archivebox for this. No requirement for an extension, just a simple bookmarklet.

bravura 4/15/2025|

Question: Does this use single file or something similar? I've basically been dying for an easy to use local bookmarking service that uses singlefile?

Second question: How easy is it to crawl the local store and apply LLMs or RAG?

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