I read lots of articles and posts in order to keep up with what’s happening with AI and L&D, as well as to improve my instructional design and other skills. For many years, I’ve been using bookmarking tools to save, tag, and organize useful resources. Last year, I switched to the Raindrop Bookmark Manager to save links and generate blog posts to share those resources. I think every L&D professional can benefit from using some sort of tool to capture useful resources so you can find them again. This is one of my top tools for supporting my own learning. In this post, I’ll explain my process for saving and sharing resources with the Raindrop bookmark manager.
This isn’t a sponsored or affiliate post—I’m just a happy customer. You can view and search my entire collection of over 2600 bookmarks on Raindrop, which includes nearly every link I’ve ever shared on my blog in the past 10+ years in a searchable resource.
Saving bookmarks with Raindrop
To start, here’s my basic process for bookmarking links with Raindrop.
Read an interesting article online.Highlight important points or quotes.Create a Raindrop bookmark.Add a description and tags.
Raindrop has both free and paid plans. I pay for the Pro plan, partly to support the tool so it continues to be available and partly for paid features like full-text search and a private back up of my bookmarks. For $28/year, it’s worth it to me. However, it’s still a highly useful tool even on the free plan.
I use Raindrop’s Firefox extension most often for bookmarking.
With the extension installed, you can highlight text on any page. Just select the text, right-click, and choose Save highlights. Highlights help me with researching topics, plus I use those highlights as quotes when I share resources on my blog.
To save a link, right-click on any page and select Create a new bookmark. This brings up a window where you can add tags and a description. I write my descriptions each time I save a link, which saves me time later. As you can see in the screenshot below, my highlighted text appears with a yellow overlay.
I also have the Raindop app on my phone, which simplifies saving links even when I read something away from my computer.
Sharing resources with Raindrop
Raindrop speeds up my process for assembling blog posts to share links. It’s easy to select the links and export them so I can add them to a blog post.
Initially, I save all bookmarks into an Unsorted collection. This is basically my signal that I haven’t shared those links on my blog yet.Every 4-5 weeks when I’m ready to create a blog post, I create a new collection for that post nested under my Blog posts collection.I open the Unsorted collection.I export the bookmarks from the Unsorted collection to an HTML page.I copy and paste everything from the exported HTML page into a blog post. This export includes the link, title, my description, and the text of any highlights.I look for recurring themes and connections in my saved bookmarks.I add headers and re-order the bookmarks and descriptions to group similar resources together.To finish the blog post, I clean up anything necessary from and add an intro and closing.Once that’s done, I move all of the unsorted bookmarks into the new collection for that blog post.
The HTML export from Raindrop is just text and links, but it works great for copying and pasting into WordPress. The screenshot below shows the export for my last ID Links post so you can compare what it looked like with the finished product.
When I switched from using Diigo to Raindrop last year, I started using a separate collection for each blog post. I’m not sure that’s actually beneficial though, so I might consolidate those separate collections into just the Blog posts collection. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure of my process. I figured it would be easier to combine the folders later than to sort them out. In practice I don’t think I’m really using those individual post collections much.
One great thing with collections in Raindrop is that you can create a public page for them. That’s how I shared my full list of bookmarks as a searchable page: I set that collection as a public page. You can also set up specific collaborators for collections, which could be very useful for teams who want to gather resources and work together.
Tools matter less than process and consistency
While I’m really happy with Raindrop, you could follow a similar process with other tools. I know some folks are a big fan of Evernote or Notion or some other tool. If you have a tool that you like and that works for you, congratulations! I think the tool itself matters less than figuring out a process that you can follow consistently. Of course, if a tool is clunky or makes it hard for you to save or share links, that creates barriers to using it regularly and creating good habits for sharing. I really wanted a tool that could highlight text on a page, which was a key feature for me in Raindrop. Everyone I know who regularly shares links like this has some sort of similar system for saving the links as they find them.
If you don’t currently have a tool you like for saving useful links, I recommend trying Raindrop.
