Using Emacs for bookmark management

This post is inspired by Mike Zamansky’s video channel on youtube¹.Since I am now using Arc as my main browser so usually I don’t usually need to manage my bookmark, sometimes when I saw interesting blogs and information, I still want to have it somewhere and preferably an annotation to tell me why I store it at the first place, to have this sort of bookmark in my emacs comes in handy.

The idea is to basically capture the url from my browser and send it to a file through emacsclient and export the file in .html form and bookmark² the page in my browser.

Also, I don’t want to export my bookmark every time when I add more information to it, it would be nice that the org file will auto export itself on saving.

Prep

• Org-protocol
• Org-capture (browser extension + templates)

Org-protocol configuration

There are abundant org-protocol configurations information online, the the only caveat is the link to the emacsclient file might be broken (see this blog post).

Org capture

Both chrome and firefox have the capture extension in the extension store. The templates are setup as following:

1(setq org-capture-templates '(
2															("p" "Protocol" entry (file+headline "~/Notes/captures.org" "Inbox")
3															 "* %^{Title}\nSource: %u, %c\n #+BEGIN_QUOTE\n%i\n#+END_QUOTE\n\n\n%?")
4															("L" "Protocol Link" entry (file+headline "~/Notes/captures.org" "Link")
5															 "* %? [[%:link][%(transform-square-brackets-to-round-ones \"%:description\")]]\n")
6															))

Be aware that, %c stands for the head of the kill-ring, therefore in order to capture the link properly, copy the link in the browser first then invoke the capture button if using the Protocol template.

The captured information will be stored in captures.org file, under Inbox and Link headings.

Open the captures.org file, copy-paste the following configuration at the end of the file:

1# Local Variables:
2# org-confirm-babel-evaluate:nil
3# eval: (add-hook 'after-save-hook 'org-html-export-to-html t t)
4# End:

This allows the corresponding html to be updated every time on saving.