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Tags stored in Savory used to be case-sensitive. This made for confusing user experience when users ended up storing two different variants of the same tag accidentally. For example, you could have some links tagged with "SQL" whereas others with "sql". The worst part was that the “sql” tag page will not list “SQL”-tagged items. Yikes!

We have now fixed this. In this first “Tech Update” post, we share a little behind the scenes peek on how we did it, and what this means for our users and for Savory itself.

Today we are releasing a big update for Savory. We’ve completely redesigned the web app with a focus on user experience and design consistency. The new interface has high information density but does not feel cluttered. It will fill you with joy browsing your huge list of unread tabs (I know it’s a huge list). We also fixed very many annoyances and added some sorely missing features — you can finally cmd+click the tags, and search your bookmarks in the new mobile interface!

Savory is your second brain. You save interesting articles for reading later or bookmark a useful website for later reference. You add tags to everything you save in Savory to curate your collection and make them easier to find in future.

In this post, I will share some tips and tricks for using tags in Savory. I also talk about a few related features that are coming soon.

In the last blog post, I mentioned how I use Savory as a personal knowledge-base and as a queue for my reading list, podcast playlist and watchlist. In this blog post, I cover the major tools in my productivity stack and go into some detail about how exactly Savory fits in my workflow.

My big three tools of choice are Gmail, Google Keep and Savory. Let’s dive in.

It’s been a weird year for everyone. Despite the challenges we all faced getting through this rough year, I hope the arrival of new year gives you hope. The worst is behind us.

It was a special year for Savory. This is the year I took the plunge and actually launched Savory in May 2020. I had been using Savory as my primary bookmark manager for about an year before I made things official. Launching Savory became my so-called pandemic project and I am glad I did it.

Savory is a web app to organize and manage your long reading list, bookmarks and references. Since launch in May 2020, Savory has used MongoDB Realm for its backend, which was nothing more than a lightweight wrapper over the underlying MongoDB Atlas cluster, with some custom authorization rules sprinkled on top.

The original backend design, or the lack thereof, was good enough when we were just getting started. But as the number of bookmarks grew, performance issues started showing up. Page load time shot up to double-digit seconds for me (6000+ bookmarks). This is partly because I am in India and the database is hosted on the other side of the world in Oregon, US. But one of the major self-inflicted problems with the design was that we were loading and returning all the bookmarks for a user from the database at page load. Yes, all 6000 of them in my case. Every time.