Highlight and Annotate Anything You Save
Cowpin
9/2/2026
Most bookmark managers stop at the link. You save a URL, maybe add a tag, and the next time you open it you're back on the live page — ads, cookie banner, newsletter popup, and all — hunting for the one paragraph that made you save it in the first place. If the page has changed since, or gone down entirely, that paragraph might not be there anymore.
Cowpin works differently. When you save a link, it fetches the article and keeps a clean, readable copy alongside the bookmark. That archived copy is what makes highlighting useful: the text you mark stays put even if the original page is rewritten, paywalled, or deleted.
Here's how the reading and annotation workflow actually works.
Open the reader
Every saved bookmark that Cowpin could archive has a Read view — a stripped-down version of the article with no site chrome, rendered in a single readable column. Open it from the bookmark's detail page. If a page couldn't be fetched (some sites block archiving, or the link was dead on arrival), the reader tells you so instead of pretending.
This is the same reader view that powers full-text search and "ask your library" — the archived text is doing several jobs at once. Highlighting is just the one you drive by hand.
Highlight by selecting text
Select any passage in the reader and it becomes a highlight immediately. There's no "add highlight" button to hunt for and no mode to toggle — the selection is the action. The marked text stays visible in the article, and a copy of it drops into the highlights list at the bottom of the page.
You get five colors — yellow, green, blue, pink, orange — so you can keep a light system if you want one: yellow for "the main claim," blue for "look into this later," pink for "I disagree." Change a highlight's color any time by clicking a different swatch; nothing is locked in at creation.
Because each highlight is anchored to a position in the archived text rather than to a fragile CSS selector on the live page, your marks survive the article reflowing, and they don't drift when you come back to them a month later.
Attach a note to any highlight
Every highlight has a note field right under it. Type your reaction, the question the passage raised, the counter-example you thought of — whatever you want future-you to see next to that quote. Notes save as you type, so there's no separate step to commit them.
This is the part that turns a pile of saved links into something you can think with. A highlight on its own is just a quote you liked. A highlight plus "this contradicts the thing from the other piece I saved last week" is the beginning of an actual idea.
Everything for a page in one place
Scroll past the article and every highlight you've made on that page is listed in order, each with its quote, its color, and its note. Click any one of them to jump back to where it sits in the text. Delete the ones that didn't age well.
It's a small thing, but having the highlights collected in a predictable spot — instead of scattered through a long article you have to re-scroll — is what makes reviewing a piece after the fact quick instead of a chore.
Export to Markdown, Obsidian, or Notion
Highlights you can't get back out are just a nicer prison. Cowpin exports a
page's highlights as clean Markdown — Copy puts it on your clipboard,
Download saves a .md file. The format is deliberately plain and
portable:
# The title of the article
Source: https://example.com/the-original-url
> The passage you highlighted, as a blockquote.
Your note on that passage, right below it.
---
> The next highlight.
One heading per source, each highlight as a blockquote, your note underneath, and a link back to the original. It pastes straight into an Obsidian vault, a Notion page, or any plain-text editor without reformatting. If your reading notes live in a personal knowledge base, this is the bridge — read and mark in Cowpin, move the distilled version into your notes when you're done with the piece.
Nothing about the export is proprietary. It's the kind of Markdown you'd write by hand if you had the patience, which means it'll still open in whatever tool you're using in five years.
Why the archive matters here
The reason all of this holds together is that the highlights sit on Cowpin's own copy of the article, not on the live web. Link rot is real — pages move, sites shut down, publishers quietly swap out content under the same URL. When that happens to a page you've annotated elsewhere, your highlights point at nothing. In Cowpin, the archived text is what you marked, so the marks and the context around them stay intact regardless of what happens to the original.
That's the whole design goal: the stuff you took the trouble to save and mark up should still be there, and still make sense, long after you saved it.
Try it
Highlighting is free while Cowpin is finding its first users, and there's nothing to configure — save a link, open the reader, select some text.
If you already have a reading list somewhere else, bring it over first. Cowpin imports from Pinboard, Pocket, Instapaper, linkding, Wallabag, and raw browser bookmarks in one step, keeping your tags, privacy settings, and read-later flags. Then start reading — and marking up — what you've been meaning to get to.