Here follows the newsletter we sent out today…
We’re delighted to announce that the Hookmark 7 public beta has begun.
It introduces another feature that is unique to Hookmark: Clean My Links™ — a system-wide way to remove tracking cruft from web URLs, working across browsers without requiring a plugin or extension.
Clean My Links™: why it matters
The web is full of links—but far too many of them are cluttered with tracking cruft, marketing parameters, and unnecessary complexity. These bloated URLs don’t just look ugly. They undermine privacy, fragment your links, and get in the way of meaningful connections between your information.
Clean My Links™ is Hookmark’s built-in solution. It automatically removes tracking cruft and unnecessary parameters from web URLs, so your links stay private, beautiful, and durable across time and contexts.
To learn more, see:
Clean My Links is still evolving. If there are additional URL patterns you’d like cleaned, Pro users can add their own custom rules (similar in spirit to ad blocking), or you can let us know in this dedicated forum topic.
If auto-updating is enabled, you’ll automatically receive improvements we make to Hookmark’s cruft-removal rules.
Brett Terpstra’s Favorites of 2025
We were also delighted to see Hookmark featured among Brett Terpstra’s Favorites of 2025 — alongside many truly excellent apps.
Brett highlighted, among others:
- Cotypist — “Predictive text anywhere you’re typing… it completes my words and sentences like it’s reading my mind.”
- DEVONthink — which Brett describes as transformative for building a deeply integrated, long-term knowledge base.
We’re honored to see Hookmark included in such company.
Reminder: Webinar — Using Hookmark for Lawyers (and Others)
📅 January 15, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific Time
Please join us for Hookmark Office Hours on Zoom: 👉 Zoom link
I’ll be showcasing how Hookmark can be used by lawyers—and by anyone working with complex documents, cases, or knowledge. Can’t make it? We’ll record the session and publish it on YouTube and on Hookmark’s forum.
Advocacy for Linking Interoperability
Many tools still aren’t link-friendly in ways that support serious knowledge work.
For example, TextExpander does not provide a Copy Link UI or API. And it does not provide a note field for annotating snippets. These limitations makes it difficult to connect contextual information to specific snips.
This week, I contacted TextExpander’s CEO @J.D. Mullin and VP of Engineering @Andrew Hoobing to request that TextExpander become link-friendly.
You can make the same request via TextExpander’s contact page using this template.
To keep things simple, you could also just link to this blog post explaining why TextExpander should become link-friendly. There’s also a forum topic dedicated to this discussion.
If you use a different text-expansion utility that you’d like to see become link-friendly, please let us know on the forum or by replying to this message.
Substack, Mastodon, BlueSky
If you’d like to follow my ongoing thinking and updates, you can find me on:
You can also subscribe to the RSS feed of the Hookmark blog.
Looking Ahead to 2026
Thank you for supporting the ideals of the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking.
We at CogSci Apps wish you all the very best for 2026.
Warm regards,
Luc
CogSci Apps Corp.