Testing Hoarder and PikaPods

I recently started testing Hoarder, a self-hostable bookmark application that caught my attention with its rich feature set. While there are many bookmark managers out there, Hoarder stands out with some interesting capabilities:

• Versatile Content Management: Beyond just saving links, you can take notes and store various types of media like images and PDFs. This flexibility makes it more of a personal knowledge base than just a bookmark manager.

• Smart Content Processing: It automatically fetches metadata from links, including titles, descriptions, and images. The AI-powered automatic tagging feature (supporting both ChatGPT and local models via Ollama) helps keep your content organized without manual effort.

• Advanced Search and Organization: With full-text search capabilities and the ability to sort bookmarks into lists, finding and organizing your content is straightforward. The OCR functionality for extracting text from images is particularly useful for making visual content searchable.

I actually prefer Linkding for its cleaner list view, but Hoarder’s additional features – especially the auto-tagging and ability to add notes – make it worth the trade-off for my use case.

Bonus Tip: Easy Self-Hosting with PikaPods

While we’re on the topic of self-hosting, I wanted to share a fantastic discovery: PikaPods. As someone who has dealt with the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) aspects of self-hosting services, I’ve always found it to be a pain point. PikaPods simplifies this entire process – you can get your self-hosted services up and running with just a few clicks, eliminating the usual operational headaches. Ok, so it’s not self-hosting, but for this use-case, I am happy to offload to a service.