Tag: hypothesis

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Early December I blogged about wanting to build a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotating in Hypothes.is (which sends everything on to my notes in Obsidian). Over the past month that has worked out nicely, with steady additions to my bookmarks and annotations, unlike before.

In that early December posting I mentioned wanting to fix two things:

Today I made a first version of tool to allow me to share to Hypothes.is from mobile. I reused the same code I made for posting within my feedreader, but with added precautions and checks because it needs to live on the open web to function.

The reason I wanted to build my own tool is that one way of doing this, through a proxy server run by Hypothes.is, will be switched off by February. The suggested replacement for mobile somehow doesn’t work in my mobile browser. I don’t know why, and felt it’s better anyway to try and build my own thing.

In this first iteration, it’s a regular webform served from one of my domains, that I bookmarked. While browsing online, I can copy the URL and e.g. the title of a page to the clipboard, and then open and populate the webform by selecting the bookmark, adding a comment and some tags. Hitting submit, sends it all to Hypothes.is. This works best if you have a clipboard on your mobile that can have multiple entries, so you have the material for one or more bookmarks and annotations on it.

So my second fix from last month I’ve now created. Probably I will iterate a bit on this, to see if I can reduce the number of steps involved.

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Bookmarked Paper Trails eindejaarsoverzicht (by Frank Meeuwsen)

Ik wil meerdere recente postings van Frank Meeuwsen annoteren in Hypothes.is. Deze over zijn mooie boekproject, die over de achterliggende betekenis van zijn Claude Code inspanningen, en vandaag een over muziek streamen.
Maar om mij onbekende redenen doet de Hypothes.is browser bookmarklet het niet op zijn site. Volgens mij gebruikt Frank een statische site met Hugo, dus aan de pagina zelf zal het niet liggen. Andere Hugo sites hebben het probleem ook niet, merk ik. Zitten er redirects in de weg? Ik zie dat de bookmarklet niet netjes opstart namelijk, en niet ‘ziet’ wat de context van annoteren is.

Gelukkig kan ik wel rechtstreeks vanuit mijn feedreader annoteren, dus bookmarken lukt op die manier wel. Maar ook als er langs die weg al een annotatie van een bericht van Frank bestaat, kan ik die niet in de browser openen of zien in de context van Frank’s pagina. Het heeft wel gewerkt, toen Frank nog niet op een subdomein zat met zijn blog. Daarna lukte het alleen vanuit mijn feedreader, niet op zijn site. Raadselachtig.

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I’ve reached 2000 bookmarks and annotations in Hypothes.is. A large chunk of those 2000 bookmarks came this month, some 20% of them. Because, mostly I think, I’ve hit on the right mindset that makes bookmarking/annotating in hypothes.is a habit. Next to having a bit more energy and mental space in general than I had for a long time, that really helps too.

Exactly four years ago today I created my Hypothes.is account. I made my first annotation there only in April 2022, and started using it regularly in late August 2022.

Two thousand isn’t a whole lot of course. Annotation is not just bookmarking, and a single page can have many annotations. Still it is relatively more than the 3200 bookmarks I collected in Delicious over the span of eleven years, from summer 2004 to summer 2015, and the hundreds I saved to Evernote between 2016 and 2020. And it makes Hypothes.is the only new addition to my otherwise shrinking distributed online presence in the past years.


The graph of my annotations, a start in the fall of 2022, then a steady linear path for two years, followed by a little jump and a much flatter usage for a year, ending in a strong jump.

I noticed early this month that something seemed to be shifting in my annotations.
Three elements are part of that shift, and they combine to make a more active habit

  • I made it easier to bookmark and annotate, by reducing the friction to annotate from right inside my feedreader.
  • I let go of the internal voice that any annotation should be a ‘proper and serious’ annotation, a result of thinking. Annotation is an every day activity, creating the breadcrumbs that may result in deeper thinking later on in my notes. All annotations flow automatically into my local notes, where I can work with them and re-use them.
  • I start with a question or topic and wander where hyperlinks take me for 15 minutes or so. This is the type of browsing like it’s 1993, when that was the only way you could take in the world wide web (and actually for a short while: take in the entire web). It feels natural, and it feeds actual current interests, work-related, side interests and every day things. It makes annotation an every day activity for real.

The first two changes make it easier to start annotating. The last change makes the biggest difference, as it results in short bursts of new annotations in a steady rhythm.

Hypothes.is isn’t a widely used tool out on the open web. It is mostly used in educational settings, for classes and groups, and integrated into learning systems. It does have a few social features though, like the ability to not just follow (through RSS e.g.) but also respond to other people’s annotations. Like in the old days of Del.icio.us that is a way to find others interested in the same thing as you but from a different perspective and using different language to describe it. I have a small roll of Hypothes.is users. You can also check out who is annotating using similar tags to yours to find new people.

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I use a personalised feedreader (running on top of a self-hosted instance of FreshRSS‘s API that handles the RSS subscriptions) since about 4 years.
My feedreader allows me to interact with the Web, not just read it. I can post to this blog (and a few other websites) directly from it and keep reading my feeds. Same for adding an annotation to Hypothes.is, and for adding a note in markdown to my filesystem in the folder where Obsidian lives.

Recently I mentioned I want to make my habit of annotating web postings in my Hypothes.is easier to keep up.
As I wrote then:

… currently from within my feedreader I can post to either my blog or to Hypothes.is, but not both. I want to change that, so that the same thing can serve two purposes simultaneously.

I now have adapted my feedreader interface and related scripts to do just that.
It can post to a few websites AND to hypothes.is AND to Obsidian all at the same time now. It used to be either just one of the sites, hypothes.is or Obsidian. Posting to both hypothes.is and Obsidian simultaneously won’t happen a lot in practice as my hypothes.is annotations already end up in Obsidian anyway. I use the saving to Obsidian mostly to capture an entire posting, where I use hypothes.is in my feedreader to just initially bookmark a page so I might return later to annotate more. The current version of the response form in my feedreader is shown below.

One element I added to the interface that I haven’t coded yet in the back-end: posting to my personal and/or my business Mastodon accounts. [UPDATE I did that now too]. When Now that is done, I can write to all the places I write the web, right from where I read it, as in Tim Berners Lee’s original vision:

The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.

Tim Berners Lee in a BBC interview in 2005

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I have been using Hypothes.is, an annotation platform, for a bit over 3 years now (my account is 4 years old).
Storing bookmarks and creating annotations that way is easy. A browser add-on makes it one click (and the writing of course) to add an annotation.

Using the Hypothes.is Obsidian plugin also means any annotation comes into my notes seamlessly through the Hypothes.is API.

I use the same API to be able to post to Hypothes.is from within my personal feedreader’s reading flow (I can also post directly to my Obsidian notes there). This means I can annotate something without opening it separately in the browser at all.

Over time I’ve looked in wonder at the speed and volume with which Chris Aldrich uses Hypothes.is on a daily basis. To me it indicates that it is his main connection between his browsing and his rough notes. He hit 10k annotations three years ago already.

Although I have mostly reduced friction for making annotations themselves, my mental model of annotations and my practice haven’t much shifted since I started using Hypoythes.is in earnest in August 2022. (Around the time Chris mentioned above hit 10k annotations.)
One pitfall is similar to ‘I should write proper blog posts‘, ‘I should properly annotate‘. Meaning not having more than 1 annotation for a site or posting isn’t ‘proper’. Only annotating things I’m reading with focus count! That sort of thing. It means a much stricter curation than necessary. The only actual question is if I want to be able to find something back again. If so, then I should add it. It’s not only annotation, it’s bookmarking too.

That goes hand in hand with me more deliberately setting aside time for myself to explore things online. Something that I lost sight of a good while ago. Finding my way back to a sense of wonder, also means wandering about online, starting from a question or notion, and following the breadcrumbs others have left on the open web. This is the good old web-surfing habit of old.

The past week I deliberately spent more time browsing and bookmarking/annotating. My annotations jumped by over 100. As a result I added several interesting scientific papers to my Zotero library, added a few books to my library, and generally had a good time finding things I didn’t know I was looking for.

Hopefully this evolves in a stronger habit of bookmarking and annotation.

Two things I intend to do, to reduce friction for this even more.
One, currently from within my feedreader I can post to either my blog or to Hypothes.is, but not both. I want to change that, so that the same thing can serve two purposes simultaneously. (Or better yet, not for now, what if I could have my own instance of hypothes.is that is also visible as a category / stream in my website?)
Two, I haven’t figured out yet if I can get hypothes.is to work on mobile, for the initial bookmarking of a site. My mobile browser regularly has a lot of open tabs at the end of a day, some of it useful to retain.

Today I hit 1700 bookmarks and annotations. Let’s see where that number stands in 3 months, as a measure of a renewed bookmarking and annotation habit.

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I can now share an article directly from my feed reader to my Hypothes.is account, annotated with a few remarks.

One of the things I often do when feed reading is opening some articles up in the browser with the purpose of possibly saving them to Hypothes.is for (later) annotation. You know how it goes with open tabs in browsers, hundreds will be opened up and then neglected, until you give up and quite the entire session.

My annotation of things I read starts with saving the article to Hypothes.is, and provide a single annotation for the entire page that includes a web archive link to the article and a brief motivation or some first thoughts about why I think it is of interest to me. Later I may go through the article in more detail and add more annotations, which end up in my notes. (I also do this outside of Hypothes.is, saving an entire article directly to my notes in markdown, when I don’t want to read the article in browser.)

Until now this forces me to leave my feed reader to store an article in Hypothes.is. However, in my personal feed reader I have already the opportunity to post directly from there to my websites or to my personal notes collection in Obsidian.
Hypothes.is has an API, which much like how I post to my sites from my feed reader can make it possible to directly share to Hypothes.is from inside my feed reader. This way I can continue to read, while leaving breadcrumbs in Hypothes.is (which always also end up in the inbox of my notes).

The Hypothes.is API is documented and expects JSON payloads. To read public material through the API is possible for anyone, to post you need an API key that is connected to your account (find it when logged in).

I use JSON payloads to post from my feedreader (and from inside my notes) to this site, so I copied and adapted the script to talk to the Hypotes.is API.
The result is an extremely basic and barebones script that can do only a single thing: post a page wide annotation (so no highlights, no updates etc). For now this is enough as it is precisely my usual starting point for annotation.

The script expects to receive 4 things: a URL, the title of the article, an array of tags, and my remarks. That is sent to the Hypothes.is API. In response I will get the information about the annotation I just made (ID etc.) but I disregard any response.

To the webform I use in my feedreader I added an option to send the information to Hypothes.is, rather than my websites through MicroPub, or my local notes through the filesystem. That option is what ensures the little script gets called with the right variables.

It now looks like this:


In my feed reader I have the usual form I use to post replies and bookmarks, now with an additional radio button to select ‘H.’ for Hypothes.is


Submitting the form above gets it posted to my Hypothes.is account