The visible part is small: paste a URL, get a permanent link. But each bkmark quietly sets several machines in motion on your behalf. This page explains every one of them.
Jump to: The token · Minting · Your library · AI summaries · Screenshots · Web archiving · Rot detection · Private links · Resolution · Handles · The export
Every bkmark is at most 100 characters of plain text: bkmark.link/you/date-time-id/what-it-is. It reads like a sentence — who saved what, and when — without clicking or looking anything up. Because every token shares one prefix, a single grep across your notes, commit messages, and chat logs finds your entire bookmark history; because the timestamp sits at a fixed position, a plain string sort puts any pile of them in chronological order.
Only the 9-character id actually routes. The handle, date, and slug are decoration — truncate or mangle them and the link still resolves.
Four ways in: the web dashboard, the Chrome extension, the JSON API (POST /api/mint with an API key from Settings), and a tiny shell function for your terminal. Minting is instant by design — the server makes zero outbound requests on that path; all slow work happens in background jobs afterwards. Minting the same URL twice returns the same token, so you can mint carelessly.
Every mint lands in your private dashboard: search by title, destination URL, or slug; filter by status (active, suspect, archived, gone); jump back to the original page in one click. No one else can see your library — every query is scoped to your account.
When you mint from the browser extension, it captures a short text excerpt of the page. A background job sends that excerpt (never the full page, never your browsing data) to Claude, which writes a one-line description. The result: your library reads like an annotated bibliography instead of a wall of titles. Links minted without an excerpt — via the API or shell — simply skip this step.
The extension can attach a screenshot of the visible page at the moment you saved it — a visual memory of what the page looked like, taken by your browser. The server never runs a headless browser and never visits the page itself. Screenshots appear on the link's detail page, and on its public landing page only if you opt in per-link.
The moment you mint, a background job asks the Wayback Machine (the Internet Archive's permanent snapshot service) to crawl and store a copy of the page — while it's still alive. Years later, when the page is gone, that snapshot still exists, taken on the very day you cared about it.
Roughly every 30 days, a health sweep quietly re-checks each of your links. Three consecutive failures and the link is flagged suspect — flagged, never auto-changed; you stay in charge. From the flag you choose: dismiss it (false alarm), or confirm it's dead — after which your token starts serving the archived Wayback copy instead. The link in your old notes keeps working; it just delivers the snapshot now.
Mark a link private and its slug is omitted from the token — the URL reveals nothing about the content. For public links you can optionally enable a richer landing page (screenshot + AI description) per-link; by default visitors see only the title, your handle, and the date before being sent onward. You also get a public profile at bkmark.link/yourhandle showing your recent public links.
Browsers get a brief landing page (or an instant redirect, if you prefer — Settings → redirect mode). Scripts, curl, and link-checkers get an HTTP 308 redirect — deliberately not a 301, which clients cache forever; a 308 means a link can always be re-pointed at an archive copy later. Deleted links aren't deleted: they become tombstones that tell visitors what was here and when.
Your handle is part of every token you mint, so handles are never recycled — every handle you've ever held stays reserved to you forever, even after a rename. No one can take over bkmark.link/you and inherit links that carry your name.
The escape hatch. From Settings, pick a passphrase and download your entire library as a single HTML file. Inside, your data is encrypted with AES-256-GCM (key derived from your passphrase) — the file leaks nothing on its own, so you can keep it anywhere: a USB stick, email, even a public web server. Open it in any modern browser, type your passphrase, and it decrypts itself locally using the browser's built-in WebCrypto — no bkmark server, no internet, no software to install. If bkmark.link disappears tomorrow, your bookmarks don't.
The string is the record. The server just makes it clickable.