Lolo

Lolo is a simple way to save and organize stuff you find on the web. I made this during the pandemic because I couldn't find a tool which encouraged me to revisit the websites I bookmarked. At the time, I was saving every interesting website, article, etc. to Notion. I appreciated how Notion extracted the content of the site so I had my own little archive. That being said, I often let my bookmarks accumulate in Notion without revisiting or organizing them later.

I wanted a tool which enabled both clipping in the moment, and rediscovery later on. Since then, I've found some tools which do this quite well: Obsidian and Are.na are some of my favorites. But I thought it would be a fun challenge to create a bit of personal technology which met my needs. This was also an opportunity to explore some new technologies, like the powerful and well documented Cytoscape.js.

In Lolo, clips might be a tasty recipe, or an interesting article. When you clip something, you can add one or more tags. This is what my Lolo looks like in the graph view:

The nodes above represent clips. The edges are tags. The graph algorithm tries to visually group together nodes of the same tag, while drawing edges (tags) in a readable format. I found it interesting how some of my interests are very intertwined, while others are more siloed.

Here's me exploring the graph of my clippings in Lolo:

I also built an autocomplete search bar which makes organizing clips by tag super easy! This also shows the process of exploring clips by jumping from tag to tag.

The process of clipping a site is super easy thanks to the Lolo Web Clipper. This Chrome extension mirrors the UI of the Lolo web application.

Finally, it's easy to transfer your data out of Lolo, if you decide to do so. You can export your data in JSON and CSV format whenever you want!