This morning I was watching the NBA playoffs and thought I'd get some work done. Nothing serious — just a low-priority item from the broader business review I've been doing. Specifically: clean up my browser bookmarks.

I've got 20 years of bookmarks across multiple Chrome profiles. A work profile, a personal profile, a couple more for client work. Yesterday I'd been trying to find something on the work profile and the bookmarks bar was so jammed with stuff that I kept dragging things I actually used to the front of the queue, just to find them. I thought: this is silly, I could fix this in an hour.

So I sat down with Claude in the Cowork app and said, here's my bookmarks export, let's go through it. And Claude offered to build me a little web tool to do it instead of just walking through the data with me.

The first version was rough. It ran in the chat window's preview and didn't save my edits, and a few buttons didn't work the first time. But after about ninety minutes of back-and-forth, I had something genuinely useful: a tool that imports a bookmarks export, lets me filter by folder and age, and lets me bulk-delete things I don't want. It also checks every link in the file and tells me which ones are dead — which is the real magic, because I had bookmarks from 2007 in there pointing at sites that no longer exist.

I ran it on my work profile. About 800 bookmarks went in, around 200 came out. Then I ran it on my personal profile — 20 more years of recipes, travel ideas, vlogs, articles I'd meant to read. Another 1,000-ish bookmarks, most of them archaeology.

There was some tweaking around what counts as "dead." A 404 means the page is gone, sure. But a 403? That's often a site blocking bots, not a dead link. A 503? Could be Cloudflare being stroppy, not a real outage. We tuned the rules so the tool only auto-flags links that are unambiguously dead — 404, 410, DNS failure, connection refused. Anything ambiguous gets kept, and you can review manually.

Once I'd cleaned my own bookmarks, I figured other people might find this useful. So I adapted the tool from a Node.js setup into a Cloudflare Pages project, deployed it to a subdomain, and here we are.

You can use it at bookmarks.brightsite.digital.

It works with exports from Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, and DuckDuckGo. Safari uses a slightly different format; I'll add support for that when I need it. Nothing leaves your browser except the URLs themselves, and only when you ask the tool to check them. There are no accounts, no tracking, no database. If you don't like the result, just don't re-import it. There's also about 30 levels of undo, so you can hack at it without worrying about wrecking anything.

The whole thing — spec, build, deploy, the works — was an afternoon. A few years ago a tool this niche would have been hard to justify building. Now it isn't, which is one of the more interesting things about where we are with AI-assisted development right now.

If you find a bug or want a feature, let me know — the contact form lands in my inbox.

If you've been meaning to clean up your bookmarks for years and never got around to it, give it a whirl.