I recreated Papaly, the bookmark manager in Logseq whiteboard :D Here's how whiteboards can be improved to make them 10x as powerful

Customization Look what I built
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Screenshots

Here’s how Logseq whiteboard looks : D

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Compared to Papaly’s interface:

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About Papaly

Papaly’s is a hierarchical bookmarking that is incredibly addictive, especially for someone that saves a lot of links due to storing links in folders and subfolders that are arranged visually for simple navigation.

How it works

Each board (whiteboard) has categories (pages) and each category can have links or subcatagories (collapsible blocks containing more links).

This has been a killer feature for me, so much so that I have been using the service despite there being server downtime and shutdown scares. I have 100s of links that are organized in this structure in the screenshot above, those are collapsed subcatagories each containing 10+ links.

You can try Papaly without extension by creating an account on papaly.com.

Missing features in Logseq: (exists in papaly of course)

  • Can’t drag and drop blocks across pages on the whiteboard.

  • Expanding does not dynamically move the other pages out of the way. Even in snap mode, things would rather awkwardly display on top or under.

  • support for importing rss :person_shrugging:

Some Clunkyness

  • Interacting can be clunky since logseq makes you select a block before allowing you to expand/collapse. If only logseq had ‘present mode’ to fix that.

  • Additional freedom of moving whiteboard is unnecessary for usecase. There is no ‘present mode’ in Logseq where it could have adjusted the board size as required.

  • Additional features are enabled through http API and may require running it before opening a browser. Running logseq as a server like “demo.logseq.com” could fix that and another other issue.

  • Set as homepage is tricky. If logseq could be hosted similar to demo.logseq.com, this would be seemless, just bookmark the url to the whiteboard. Bookmarking exported HTML would not reflect new changes.

Available features (parity with papaly)

  • Send link to the pages on whiteboard using one of the many browser extensions. (Ability to control how it gets stored may vary)

  • Find bookmarks in search results on browser using Logseq copilot extension. I don’t think you can set Logseq as a search engine for search suggestions, maybe create a feature request if this was possible on ff or chrome. And demo.logseq.com is not recognized as a search engine which is an alternate method.

Results

Very impressed with Logseq on it’s flexibility. I never imagined that I would end up using whiteboards let alone desperately need features for it.

I would say it looks great so far even with the pending features, and that something as useful as Papaly can serve as an inspiration for Logseq to improve whiteboard.

Obviously Logseq is a more powerful organizing tool that can outdo any bookmark manager so, it’s important to polish this feature.

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Interesting! Can you share the skeleton?

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What’s a skeleton? :sweat_smile:

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Yeah, I am not a native english speaker, might not be the right word.
I mean the logseq whiteboard without containing any data. I’d like to try your implementation.

Currently using Kanban with https://github.com/benjypng/logseq-kanban-plugin. But there are some missing features.

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Logseq doesn’t export whiteboards properly since all the contents are stored as block/page references. But no need to use a skeleton to do that, you can create your own whiteboard with such a layout in less than a minute in Loseq itself.