I keep bookmarks in Linkwarden, which I self-host, and I keep everything else in Obsidian. That split was fine until I noticed I was searching in the wrong place roughly half the time. A bookmark I had saved with a purpose in mind was invisible from the notes where that purpose was being worked out.
So I wrote a small Obsidian plugin that pulls Linkwarden collections into the vault as notes.
One note per collection
The unit is the collection, not the individual bookmark. Each collection becomes one Markdown file with its links inside it, which keeps the vault from filling with hundreds of one-line notes. Mine currently produces 49 files in a single folder, one per collection, and that folder is the only thing the plugin touches.
Under the hood it asks the Linkwarden API for /api/v1/collections, then walks each one through /api/v1/links with a cursor, taking a page at a time rather than demanding everything at once. That matters on a self-hosted instance where you are the one paying for the request.
Settings
Four things: the URL of your instance, an API key, the folder the notes should land in, and whether to sync when Obsidian starts. There is one command, Sync collections, for when you want it to happen now. It works on mobile as well as desktop, since all it needs is the ability to make an HTTP request.
Pointing it at your own instance is the entire point. The API key never leaves your machine and the requests never leave your network, which is the same reason the bookmarks are self-hosted to begin with.
What it changed
Less than I expected and more than I can now do without. The bookmarks did not become more organised. They became reachable from the place where I do the thinking, which turns out to be most of what I wanted from a bookmark manager and none of what I was getting.
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