Rember

Between my job and my personal life, I use a few devices – a work laptop, a personal laptop, a phone and a tablet. Sometimes I find something on the internet I want to return to later on another device. I could just bookmark it, but I'm weird with bookmarks, I don't like long dropdown menus with lots of nested folders, it gets messy.

I wanted a website where I could store links and access them anywhere at any time. Something browser-agnostic, no syncing required. Something really simple. So I decided to create it myself, for myself.

The flow would be simple: paste a link (or enter the URL), choose a title and, optionally, an image and save. But the more links I add, the more necessary it would be to organise them, so it needed folders too.

Rember (imagine 'remember' but spelled by a toddler) was born in 2016.

Initially, the tool was pretty humble, after all, it was just for me and my weird niche bookmark use case, but I couldn't hide it from my colleagues who took notice.

It was during the phase in a project where you're gathering inspiration that Rember found another use: a collaborative, organised repository of project-related links. So I added collaborative features to the interface, such as shared boards with roles to manage and curate the content shared on it.

Soon, the whole design team was using Rember, and while there was no shortage of tools out there that could do what Rember was doing, it was the simplicity that made it our go-to tool. At our company, we had access to InVision Freehand and Miro, but none are easy to just open and find something you saved a week ago. With Rember, you simply paste a link, the tool scrapes the website and finds a title and image, you select a board and you're done. Anyone involved in the project could be added as a collaborator.

To make saving websites even simpler, I developed a Chrome extension so users could save websites without leaving the page they're on.

Rember is accessible by invitation at this stage. But it's still evolving and those that use it, really enjoy it.

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© 2023 — Andrew Stichbury