Today we are shipping a new feature for Micro.blog Premium subscribers: bookmark tags. This is a big improvement for using bookmarks, and it touches several parts of the platform and apps.
There is updated documentation for bookmarks with new screenshots. There is a new version of the Mac app: version 3.0, with not just bookmark tagging but also a new interface for seeing recent highlights.
Wait, highlights? Yes, a little-known feature in Micro.blog Premium is that you can bookmark anything, not just short microblog posts. When you bookmark web pages, Micro.blog downloads a copy of the text so you can read the web page later without all the clutter. In this reading mode, you can select text and save highlights to your Micro.blog account, making it easier to find passages of important text or blog about them later.
I recorded a screencast video here on YouTube with a demo of bookmarks and highlights. It’s 8 minutes long. 📺
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to improve bookmarks. One seeming disconnect is that your hosted blog uses categories, not tags. This was deliberate: categories are generally simpler and more obvious as a navigation aid on your blog for readers. In other words, categories were chosen as an optimization for your readers, and deciding to only have categories and not tags keeps the interface in Micro.blog streamlined.
You’ll need different tools to organize bookmarks, and you may eventually have thousands or tens of thousands of bookmarks. Micro.blog imports existing bookmarks and tags from Instapaper, Pocket, and Pinboard. The ad-hoc nature of tags is more flexible and optimized for quickly adding bookmarks, compared to blog posts where you may want to put a little more thought into where readers expect a blog post to live within a shorter list of categories.
We’ll continue to improve bookmarks as we hear from folks who are consolidating their data to Micro.blog. I expect there will be feedback about different workflows people are used to.
A note on pricing. Micro.blog Premium is our $10/month subscription, with the bookmark features plus podcast hosting, video hosting, and email newsletters. While nearly every other service in the world has increased their prices in the last few years, Micro.blog’s base subscription remains at $5/month. We can do this because we have customers who have upgraded to the optional $10 plan.
If you’ve been wondering about Micro.blog Premium, I hope these new features give you a reason to check it out. You can upgrade or downgrade whenever you want. We never delete your data when downgrading, so it’s always there if you want to come back to it.
Happy bookmarking! 🏷️
