Why I built Diviide

Bookmarks pile up. Work links, personal links, projects, things you mean to read. Soon your bar is a row of tiny icons that all look the same. You want to group them, so you can find the right one fast. That is the job Diviide does. I built it because the tools I tried did not do that job well.

The job to be done

I follow an idea from Bob Moesta called Jobs to Be Done. People don't simply buy products, they hire them to make progress.

So instead of starting with who the customer is, I start with what they're struggling with and what progress they're trying to make. Before I built anything, I wrote that struggle down as a story.

When my bookmarks pile up across projects and parts of my life, I want to quickly find and access the right one, so I can get where I need to go without digging through a mess of saved links.

Every choice in Diviide comes back to that. If it doesn't help you make that progress, it doesn't belong.

What pushed me to build it

The clutter cost me time. Every day I scanned the whole bar to find one link. So I went looking for a tool to add separators. Each one I tried let me down in some way. I have since written up how those tools compare, but here is the short version.

Where other tools fell short

• Too many clicks. Menus and pages for every single separator.
• Gray globes. I picked an icon and got a blank globe instead. Fixing it meant leaving the page I was setting up. Here is why gray globes happen.
• Ads. Banners and pop ups, crowding a small tool.
• Paywalls. A charge for a few icons.
• Extensions. They ask for permissions and can break after a browser update.

Why doesn't the browser just do this?

Here is the strange part. Most browsers will not let you add your own. Chrome even shows a divider of its own in the bookmarks bar, yet gives you no way to make more. Even where a browser can add a plain one, it is just a thin line, with no color or icon. That gap is what Diviide fills.

How Diviide does the job

Diviide keeps it simple.

• Every separator and color sits on one page.
• Pick a color. Drag a separator to your bar. Done.
• No gray globes. The icon loads as you drag it.
• No ads, no advertising trackers.

It is free and open source. It is the separator tool I wanted the browser to come with.

You know it worked when

• You glance at your bar and spot the right group at once.
• You find a bookmark in a few seconds.
• No blank globes break the look.
• Setup took almost no time.

That is the bar I wanted, and the one Diviide helps you build. For ideas, see the creative ways to use separators.

Why it is open source

I am not a developer in my day to day work. I picked up coding over the years by using it to solve my own problems, and more recently some training and small pieces of engineering in my job turned that interest into practice. Diviide is part of that: a real project to learn on, and something I wanted to share.

That is why the code is public under the MIT license: so you feel free to use it, adapt it, or contribute to it. The public repo holds the core of the project, everything it needs to run on its own or as part of something else. This site is built on top of it, and yours could be too.