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2026-05-26
Building Marq

Building Marq has been a really cool adventure. It’s a bigger product than what I usually do, and it was a great way to test out using a cheap AI to help me build a genuinely good app.

Honestly, it’s a tool I didn’t even know I needed until recently.

My browser bookmark bar isn't really used for normal bookmarks. Instead, I use it to hoard useful web tools, dev resources, and websites with really nice CSS styles that I want to look at later.

They're things I actually need, but the default browser setup is terrible for this. Whenever I actually needed to find a specific link, I couldn't.

So I built Marq. It’s a dead-simple, local-first bookmark manager. No servers, no bloat, just your browser.

I wanted to keep the mechanics as simple and frictionless as possible. Here is the core breakdown:

• 100% Local-First: Your bookmarks never leave your device. There are no accounts to create, no tracking scripts, and zero servers involved.
• Fuzzy Search: You can type any characters in order to find something. For example, typing "mfx" will instantly match and pull up Miniflux. No rigid filtering.
• The Bookmarklet: You just drag a button to your browser's bookmarks bar. When you’re on a page you want to save, you click it once, and it’s added.
• Auto-save: Every change saves automatically straight to localStorage. You don't have to look for a "Save" button.
• Export Any Time: If you want a backup, you can download your data as raw YAML or JSON whenever you feel like it.

Because of how it's built, hosting this is incredibly easy for anyone else who wants to use it:

• Zero Dependencies: It's just static files. There is no build step, no npm packages to update, and no backend to maintain.
• Easy Forking: You can literally grab the files, fork it, tweak the code, and host it yourself anywhere that serves static files (or just run it locally out of a folder).
• The UI Status: Personally, I think the design looks super cool. The dark mode is great. The light mode? I kind of hate it right now. But since I built this primarily as a dark mode product for myself, I didn't care too much during the initial push.

What I'm Working on Next

• Fixing that light mode so it's actually decent and easier on the eyes.
• Designing a proper new icon.
• General big and small quality-of-life improvements.

🌳,
Marco