Slashdot Mirror
How Do You Keep Track of Your Web-Based Research?
time961 asks: "I use the Web extensively to research a wide variety of topics (weird, huh?). However, much of the time I end up printing out web pages and filing them on paper, because that's the easiest way I know to say 'OK, that was interesting, I'll hold on to it until I actually do something about this topic'. Often, I'll run across something that seems relevant to a long-term project or interest and just want to grab it without even reading the details. Paper is OK for reading, browsing, and scribbling, but it's hard to search, it's heavy, and it's wasteful (and I yearn for a day when browsers can reliably print what's on the screen, instead of cutting it off at the margin because some designer doesn't understand layout!). How do others deal with organizing the results of browsing?"
Bookmarks and histories aren't the answer — they're not very good for searching, the UI isn't very good for, say, adding notes, and they don't work offline. Also, stale URLs are a huge problem — a key advantage of paper is that it doesn't randomly fade out in a few days (or decades), so a good solution would have to keep copies, not just references. I imagine something like a FireFox plug-in with a 'Remember This' button and some options for category, keywords, annotations, etc., but I'll bet there are more creative approaches, too."
That's it.
First off, install a good PDF printer.
Just save your 'research' to a nice media server or something and then you can do the 'hands on' stuff once the missus has left for work innit.
Ever heard of bookmarks ?
Of course one problem with them is that they can disappear or change between the moment you save them and the moment you use them. The obvious answer is to save a local copy (with wget, or whatever..) which will be easier to search than a paper... And you can still print it if you need.
Then you can easily search though all the pages you downloaded for the one which holds the information you need, which probably takes you a long time with paper...
Of course all those things are bloody obvious and i don't understand how they can make a ask slashdot headline. Or maybe I didn't understand something in your problem ?
Hey, it's the 21st century - put them all in your blog.
At the bottom of the
You can use basket of the KDE PIM package. It allows you to organize bookmars, text, images and other data effectively and consistently. It's like a sticky notes program, though with much more functionality and it allows to store and retrieve information very quickly. It also saves automatically and may have a few very disturbing bugs (I think the major one is a Qt bug), yet it's definitely worth enough for me to use it every day.
I agree. It's very handy to have. I keep records of my online bill payments that way too. It might not do away with the formatting problems though.
I myself have an extensive 'drawer' of bookmarks. I've installed the TinyMenu extension for firefox, and placed the bookmarks toolbar folder on the same row as the menu was on prior to that extension. I've then got top-level folders across the entire browser, which each contain a highly nested / hierarchical structure. A sampling of my top level folders: Make (for hardware hacking related stuff), tools (where I keep various 'useful every three weeks' links), Queue (stuff I need to get to at some point), studies (links to lots of OpenCourseWare courses, in areas I want a refresher), Development (links to the various useful sites I've found. For instance, deep in there is a folder for all the Rails Plugins that I want to keep an eye on). I then use Deskbar (GNOME, or Launchy on Windows, or Quicksilver on OS X) to give me keyword access to these bookmarks. So when I want to upload photos to my flickr account, I "Alt+F3 Upload [Enter]" and I'm at the multi-upload page.
A PDF Printer is important for longevity of articles, but I think a proper bookmarking system has to be in place first, and I think most people get this horribly wrong.
-knewter
File -> "save page as" -> "web page, complete".
You can either keep what you save in some sort of logical arrangement, or trust your handy desktop search engine to find it for you later (though that seems to reduce the problem back to finding the info in the first place, though at least you don't need to worry about the content going offline at some future date.
Just write to your ISP pretending to work for one **AA and you'll immediately get a complete list of your activities. As a bonus, you can also use that to terminate your subscription without the 2 mounthes notice.
...or 'favourites' if you haven't switched to Firefox yet.
Use folders and subfolders to organise them, and if you really honestly have an unmanageably large number of bookmarks that you couldn't possibly just google again later, cut and paste from the bookmarks file to any kind of saveable text document.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Google Desktop Search and PDF. GDS does the indexing, PDF preserves the original page.
A good use of directories for organizing helps to avoid "lost" files from floating around. I use this for research papers and projects.
I often copy all the relevant text from several sites on a topic I'm researching... paste it into a text document then save it to my hard drive. I save pics that way too. Instead of grabbing the whole page. Makes for easy printing if I want a hard copy.
Any time someone mentions how they don't like having papers around but want a hard copy, my response is immediately, print it to PDF! Your operating system should be able to do this :) Linux firefox, print to generic printer to a file named something.ps, then run ps2pdf on it, in just about every other GNOME app PDF support is built in to the print dialog. Mac OS X, well, you already knew you could save PDF (or save the preview, same diff) from your print dialog. Windows: www.sf.net/projects/pdfcreator is your friend - just don't install their toolbar (the existence of which makes me rather sad). Then, you've got the page (or whatever) archived in a nice, portable, paper-like file, and when desktop search is ready for the masses (if you're not on a Mac), you'll even be able to search it - much better than paper!
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
I would use a mindmapping program (freemind in linux for instance or mindjet mindmanager in windows). This will give you the possibility to organize websites, notes, scans and more sources in one overview. Check more info on this via the following links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindmap http://www.mapyourmind.com/index.htm http://www.mind-mapping.org/mindmapping-and-you/ba sic-introduction-to-mindmapping.html
good luck!
Acrobat has a feature called "convert web pages to PDF" from within Acrobat that is quite useful to archive websites digitally while preserving the formatting and keeping things searchable (with OS X Spotlight, for example). When you install Acrobat, Internet Explorer 6.0 (or higher) even gains an Adobe PDF toolbar that you can use to generate PDF from within IE. I guess most Slashdotters use different browsers, but at least on OS X you can easily print to PDF natively.
As a member of the legal profession, I do a large amount of research online. My site of choice is Westlaw, produced by the largest legal publisher in the country (and thus probably the world). They have a feature on their website they call "Research Trails", which keeps a record of your navigation each time you log in. The list is fully linked, so you can access any document on the list easily. You can not only see what you looked at but see the order in which you looked at it, which helps in reconstructing thought patterns. This is a dramatically helpful feature for any research site, and they are to be commended for implementing it.
Their major competitor, LexisNexis, has a similar feature.
I know this doesn't help much for general-purpose multi-site research, but I can't say just how useful this feature is for a single site. I would recommend other site developers to create similar functionality as soon as convenient. Imagine how useful this could be for Wikipedia.
On second thought, scratch that. Sometimes I really don't want to know how I got from point A to point B on that site.
I will have to agree with other people saying that PDF *is* the way to save web pages for future reference (i used to use MHT but it is propietary and you cant add notes).
For the annotations I would suggest the FoxIT PDF reader (free) and buy the Pro Pack [US$40 ](one of the few softwares I have found so useful and at good price to actually buy) which will allow you to add annotations and mark the text among other things.
I will use this post to ask if anyone knows of an open source alternative to this the ProPack that lets you add comments, marking and other basic editing features. I would think that is something *lot* of people want.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Then just get Google Desktop or something similar to index those.
Can anyone recommend a good PDF printer driver application so people who can't afford Acrobat can still print to PDF?
You can find all the features in a nice list at the official homepage with tons of pretty screenshots. There's even a 50 page manual (PDF) created by Andrew Giles-Peters.
Even though development has seemingly halted since December 2005, it's still one of the most well rounded extensions for Firefox I've come across yet.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Today's batch of Word Processors (not your simple notepad and editor software) is a pretty good bunch, by and large, and most, if not all, will take the HTML page and nearly faithfully reproduce it's content. Then store it in a topic named hierarchy of folders. Now it is organized, searchable and backup-able. Furthermore, all of the modern word processors I am aware of allow you to annotate the content and track your changes. Voila!! Simple solutions are really best.
You need the Firefox extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427 .
Helps you to save Web pages and organize the collection.
Microsoft has the answer to this one. One Note. It's absolutely magnificent for stuff like that. There are some other programs which take similar stabs at the same problem, Treepad, Infomagic, and, of course, Google Notebook. But One Note wins this one walking away.
wget is probably one of my favourite Linux command-line tools. All I need to do is wget -r http://www.doodahdoo.com/ and it saves a directory called doodahdoo.com and all the pages in it, as well as the images, and any embedded video and such. This is very handy, not only for getting a huge number of files (say my http backup server), but also for getting entire sites that I might have a use for in future.
At the moment, I have on order of 10GB just of websites, radio clips, and what have you that I have used for previous research. Not only that but I can also maintain a simple directory structure and never have to worry that that "firefox plugin" will still be compatible with version 4.765.
Another neat function is you can specify just a particular files (www.whatever.com/pic.jpg), or all the files with a particular extension *.jpg, or only the files in that directory. You can also use it to spider (limited) all the links on a site. Though be kind and don't do this too often, as I am sure it eats a lot of bandwidth.
The last (and greatest) thing, is it remains in a well-known and easily editable format.
Alternatively, I have also used a MediaWiki setup so that I could drop down notes for classes, or other interesting things in it, but this required substantially more overhead than wget.
I've been struggling with this myself, to a point. How about a personal wiki, such as Didiwiki, that runs locally?
I also save web pages as "Web Page, Complete". It now occurs to me that I should make a specific directory for those pages.
1 in 4 Maine children in struggle with hunger.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonth ink/
Using a good PDF exporter (I'm on OS X, so look elsewhere for free & easy ways to do this on Windows), DEVONthink will pretty much keep everything organized like a digital filing cabinet.
'Course, the cheapest version costs $39.95, but I can attest to the fact that this software WORKS (I got it heavily discounted in the MacHeist 2006 bundle).
I quite like Yojimbo http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/
You can either save a "web archive", which is the web page incl. all graphics/css/etc., or a PDF of the page (nicely integrated into print services). Both document types are rendered inside the app and are searchable. Yojimbo has also tags and folders to keep things organised. And you can also save regular notes (formated and with images). Covers all bases.
When it comes to pure PDF, YEP http://www.yepthat.com/ is an excellent alternative. Kind of the iPhoto of PDF.
The problem is that the Web is stored electronically. Oh, if only there were some way of storing electronic data in some sort of non-volatile format. If only we could take a File that is a web page and Save page as... something.
I personally lean toward the open source option... but how do CutePDF and PDFCreator stack up against each other in terms of stability, features and bugginess?
Thanks for the suggestions by the way!
I used to email myself a link to a page when I found something interesting. The email account I used for that is so clogged up I had to stop using it. Now I've installed the del.icio.us plugin for firefox I just use that you tag pages by topic so you can just look through all the pages you have tagged with a particular topic.
On the subject of PDF printing I used to do that too but my hard drive got clogged up with a bunch of stuff I would never get round to reading. Cute Pdf is free for windows, in Linux print to file and use pstopdf or a similar too, I'm sure there is a print to pdf tool as well I've never used one though...
> I would recommend other site developers to create similar functionality as soon as convenient. Imagine how useful this could be for
:-) http://pathway.screenager.be/about-pathway/
> Wikipedia.
Pathway does just that for Wikipedia, it is great
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Back in the day there was this cool little program called Webforia Organizer. I somehow wound up on the Beta team for it and got to use it extensively. This program was really cool, it clipped pages, kept local copies, was searchable, etc. I loved it. Unfortunately, it was built on IE 5, but then again, Firefox wasn't released back then...
Apparently Webforia went out of business some time ago and the software no longer works.. I believe it had limited functionality with IE 6, but not enough to make it worthwhile.. No clue if it would even work with IE 7...
I still have my copies... I really wish it worked. I had amassed a huge database of research that's basically useless now.. (although, since it clipped them as web pages, I supposed I can, technically, view them... But the names were based off GUIDs, so identifying the pages is a little rough...)
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
I'm very careful about managing my bookmarks, only adding what I'm actually interested in at a given moment and removing the link once it's gone. Since "the literature" required for my research primarily consists of journal and conference publications, the locations of which are fairly immutable, I don't usually worry about the URLs becoming invalid.
:)
If I get any "aha" ideas while reading these papers, I record them in a whiteboard or notebook. Eventually, I have the paper distilled to three or four of these and I no longer need to read the paper to think about the ideas presented therein.
Basically, if you manage your bookmarks well and take good notes, that's all you need
I'm a Ph. D. student in Computer Science with an INTJ MBTI type. YMMV, depending on profession ("research" means different things to different people) and personality ('P' types tend to organize themselves differently).
It's a program that allows you to easily save a copy of just about anything (certainly anything on the web...) with links to the original and everything else. The notes are automatically stored in chronological order for browsing. You can also apply tags to your liking and it has full search capabilities as well. It's free for the regular version, if you want to import handwritten notes and have them be searchable as well there's a charge.
It's awesome and I think fits your needs exactly, or at least I use it to meet the needs you described and I've had no problems with it.
Now if I could just force myself to go back and do something with the research later...
P.S. There's a writer in The Atlantic named James Fallows who has a column on useful technology tools. That's where I first learned of Evernote. He had several other suggestions to fit the bill in that column and more generally, he's usually worth a read.
In my bookmarks folder I have a "Projects" folder.
Within my "Projects" folder I have an alphabetic listing of folders with each project's name.
If the project is small, I fill it directly with book marks. I do take the time to add notes, because if the URL does go stale, the notes will let me know what I'm now missing. More often than not, missing information can be replaced in the future with another URL that has the same or more up-to-date information. Additionally Google Desktop searches my bookmarks file, so I just double-click ctrl and can search via keywords that way.
This whole setup is a bit of a hack, but it's worked. I'm hoping either Firefox 3.0 will have a fantastic bookmark manager or a plug-in author creates something truly wonderful for the existing bookmark system.
In Opera you can select some text in a webpage, then right-click and select "Copy to note" (Shift-Ctrl-C). Notes are stored in a panel, and double clicking a note will load the webpage it came from. Handy.
great research manager, just type zotero in google.
This looks great. Thanks for posting.
I run a full-blown install of MediaWiki on a small server behind my firewall. I wanted to learn MediaWiki markup and I thought it would be a useful tool for organizing and annotating all the crap I come across on the web that I'm going to want to find later.
I also wrote a sort of pico-Google in PHP/MySQL a couple years back, and I still use that regularly. It's a sort of searchable bookmark database. I feed it a URL, it goes out to the page and sucks down all the text, normalizes it, and breaks it into keywords. It then stores the keywords in the database. It's got well over 3,000 pages in it at this point and even on my little 1 GHz machine with 512M of RAM, it hauls ass. I used to have a separate component that went out and checked each link every night to see if it had moved or changed, but I gave up on that part when I decided the whole thing needed a rewrite anyway. And, as is typical for these hobby projects, I haven't yet gotten around to it. I want to implement multi-word text-string searching (i.e. searching for "a string of words in quotes"), a few Google-esque functions like inurl:, and make the interface not look like total crap the way it does now. Maybe someday...
So, at this point, if there's information I consider especially worth saving or looking at, I dump it into my personal Wiki. If it's something I just think I might want to use later for some reason, I throw it in the bookmark database.
Where do I get THAT?
The most annoying part of web-based research was for me always copy & paste. Each month I am doing a literature digest from my scientific field, which requires me to copy titles, abstract, urls of selected articles. And each journal has another format / layout, furthermore, you sometimes need more than this information, so that manual copying is necessary. Copy, switch to the editor window, paste, switch to the browser window, where the hell am I, copy, ...
Therefore, I have written myself a small tool to record all copy operations automatically. Essentially, anything that I mark (since this means "copy" in Linux) gets *added* to a clipboard. I am not going to publish it, though, because it was written in perl/tk and seems to work only with particular versions of perl/tk, but as an idea it greatly improved the process of storing my web searches. I tried to find a ready tool that does just that, but I could not find anything.
Cheers,
j.
I'm normally not a web 2.0 bandwagon type of person, but del.icio.us is probably the most useful thing for this that I have ever run across.
pros:
-tagging
-descriptions
-accessible from anywhere
-really simple to add to (with firefox plugin)
-searchable
cons:
-web pages are ephemeral
-del.icio.is itself could go away someday, and I'm not sure how to back it up locally
The best way to address the issue of web pages being ephemeral is to, as others have said, print to pdf. You mac people have it nice in this regard, but it is not hard to set up on windows or *ix.
I also mentioned that del.icio.us was searchable, but only the tags, titles, and descriptions. I fully expect google to someday roll out a similar service someday that lets you search through the pages you have tagged. That would be very useful.
I also like the suggestion of a personal wiki, but more for keeping track of little "tips and tricks" that I stumble upon rather than entire web pages.
Finkployd
How do others deal with organizing the results of browsing?
I do this as regularly as anyone.
lynx -dump > ~/docs/filename
or if you're organised
lynx -dump | add_to_database_script
What's important to me is the content itself, not the "web content", so an attorney, for example, would take a very different approach (typically a hard copy that can be filed, duplicated, etc.). Note that unless you work for a law firm or a well-run business, managing paper is like a dog walking on its hind legs: it's rare to see to it done, and when you do, it's not done very well. The same applies to bookmarks which have the additional problem of referencing pages that may get moved or simply disappear at any time.
In my experience PDF and HTML are like cousins who should refrain from getting to close to each other. By comparison, processing simple text is straightforward.
I fully expect google to someday roll out a similar service someday that lets you search through the pages you have tagged. That would be very useful.
Guess I should have read all of the comments in this story before replying. I would have learned about Google Notebook which looks like exactly what I was thinking of.
Finkployd
For web surfing I right-click and use 'send to'. I use the 'from' (me) and 'subject' to set appropriate filters on Thunderbird. This is then sent to various archive folders in the Thunderbird client and I archive occasionally. Also, highly searchable ... sometimes write a small blurb in the body.
I stick to Endnote for papers. Is a little more time consuming but it is better in the long term.,
.
Like a couple other people suggested, I have a personal installation of MediaWiki. Actually, several installs. One for my own personal info. One for thesis research (shared with a couple fellow students and my advisors), one for my sideline web-development biz, one with work documentation. Lots of uploaded files, too. When I get a new gadget, the manual (PDF hopefully, but scanned if I have to), a scan of the receipt, and my setup notes all go to a page on it. Random piece of software I hadn't heard about before, but don't have time to play with? Gets it's own page, and then a link from a "software I should check out someday" page.
One critical thing is to be able to throw in just about any little bit of text information with no setup, from anywhere with a net connection. Unlike more rigid information management systems, it usually doesn't matter that there isn't a template for this kind of information. The other thing is searchability. The MediaWiki/MySQL text search isn't great, but it's enough.
Now, there's lots of cruft in my wiki. My old airline flight schedules. Meeting notes. But, unlike a raft of little paper notes, a lot of unnecessary wiki pages are pretty harmless if you've got lots of server hard drive space.
Instead save the page to disk. Much more accessible:
- full-text search, on one or multiple files
- text and other elements can be copied off the page
- links still work
Pity Windows doesn't attach comments to a file: in Mac OS 9 at least, if you saved a Web page, the page URL would end up as a comment (viewable by doing Get Info on the file).
Wikipedia info on WikidPad.
Official download page
Productivity note: Create your wikis in Original Sqlite and setup Google Desktop Search to scan .wiki files (with Larry's Any Text File Indexer).
Zoot http://www.zootsoftware.com/ may meet your needs.
Self awareness - try it!
This is so unfair. Are you a webdesigner? Are you even a designer at all? If you've ever done both print design and web design, you will appreciate how much more challenging web design is. Imagine designing for a completely unique for every viewer canvas, rather than, say, 10,000 identical copies of a newspaper or print ad. You have to allow for every possible screen resolution, browser platform, colour depth, operating system, javascript status, flash version, etc etc etc, and now you're insulting us because on top of that we "don't understand layout" because we can't make it print prettily as well? Thanks a bunch.
At risk of getting modded down for recommending a Microsoft product here, you might want to look into OneNote 2007 (or one of the versions of Office 2007 that include it.)
It comes with a "print to..." driver so you can print to your OneNote notebook, and provides a good framework for organizing your notes, and you don't need to kill as many trees as printing to paper.
Another possibility is to get a PDF printer; you can either just organize your notes with file system folders, or if you want something a little bit more useful to track relations between different items, you can use something like PersonalBrain to for organization.
Along the same vein, Google Notebook is also quite nice, and comes with a Firefox extension as well. No images, however (I personally don't use them), but fairly simple, and you don't store everything locally. Worth a look, IMO.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
There's a startup in Santa Barbarba called "SwitchBook" that has a browser plugin which is all about supporting complex searches. I expect it to be available quite soon. It allows you to cut and paste content from pages, placing them into a scrapbook sidebar, and as you build references an internal search engine starts finding more info based upon the content you're grabbing. Should be a winner...
You might want to check out the kdissert program. It runs in KDE, but if you have the proper libraries and dependencies, you should be able to run it on any WM.
The description follows (taken from Ubuntu 7.04, I'm sure the description is the same for other distros as well)
kdissert is a mindmapping tool for supporting the creation of complex documents: dissertations, theses, presentations, and reports. It supports pictures and features several document generators: LaTeX reports, LaTeX slides (based on Prosper and Beamer), OpenOffice.org documents, HTML, and plain text.
A mindmap is a multicolored and image centered radial diagram that represents semantic or other connections between portions of learned material. For example, it can graphically illustrate the structure of a thesis outline, a project plan, or the government institutions in a state. Mindmaps have many applications in personal, family, educational, and business situations. Possibilities include note-taking, brainstorming, summarizing, revising and general clarifying of thoughts.
Though this application shares some similarities with general-purpose mindmapping tools like FreeMind or Vym, the very first goal of kdissert is to create general-purpose documents, not mindmaps.
The kdissert website is located here. The program was designed to manage and organize disserations, which from what you described, is probably very similar to the work you're doing.
If you're looking for a tool more oriented towards 'mindmapping', there is Vym (website), which seems very interesting, and FreeMind (website), written in Java, though I have no experience with it.
It sounds like from what you described, and the solutions others are offering, you are more interested in a 'general-purpose' document where you can list your sources, and if needed, map links, connections, and references to the various sources you're using. Vym might be more to your taste, since the layout is provides a great deal of information in very (imho) visually appealing format, with the ability to link objects together in complex ways (such as doumenting various reference sources in a paper, where they appear and/or referenced in other works, etc.) Such tools like Vym and KDissert are really only limited by your own mind, though the differences between the programs are sufficient enough that each one should be evaluated individually, since all three accomplish similar goals in very different ways.
~ow3n
is called Insipid - http://www.neuro-tech.net/insipid/
It's basically a delicious clone but the feature I love the most is the snapshotting one. That way I never have to worry about the information going missing. It's been very useful for things that are hosted on university servers that disappear when the student leaves. Some of my bookmarks are private while others are public. They provide a javascript snippet you can put in your toolbar to bookmark the current page.
It requires a server of your own to host it but it works for me.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
For me using LaTeX, this is especially handy given that I'll want to cite many of these in actual papers. However, even for things I'm not going to cite, it helps a good bit in organization. You can search by authors, keywords, dates, whatever. I use keywords to tag whatever subjects it refers to (as far as my interests identify subjects), and an extra keyword if I have a specific project/paper in mind for it.
If you don't use Mac, there's similar things on other platforms.
I use text file and the Firefox Copy URL + extension:
:: Firefox Add-ons9
Copy URL +
"The Copy URL+ extension enables you to copy to the clipboard the current
document's address along with additional information such as the document's
title, the current selection or both."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12
It installs a context-menu, allowing you to copy any or all of page title, URL, and most importantly: the text currently selected.
At other times, I use bookmarks in a new folder specific to the subject. You can add keywords to bookmarks in FF.
In a nutshell:
- JKN is free, web-based, cross-browser, and registration-optional.
- JKN supports frame-sets, secure web pages (https), and multi-web pages.
- With the optional FireFox add-on, you can annotate password-protected web pages.
- The resulting Annotation can be emailed, blogged, saved, bookmarked (including delicious) and printed.
- Annotations can be saved as public or private.
Here is an annotation example of this very discussion with my (somewhat) insightful comments:http://jkn.com/View?j=814255.882997363546&t=03/
Full disclosure: I am the founder and chief rabble-rouser for JKN.
Founder, JumpKnowledge - www.jkn.com
In IE 7.0, If you click File ->Save As, you can save the page as a .mht file. IE refers to it as a "Web Archive, Single file". It includes the HTML and graphics a single file, and doesn't seem to munge the page up (at least not any worse than IE does in the first place, that I have noticed).
Er,uh, at least, that is what I hear, from some losers I know who use IE7 (What was I thinking? I must have forgotten where I am).
--something witty
This is something I wrote so that I could do away with Firefox bookmarks altogether and have the same bookmarks on my laptop and desktop.
It's server-based and works with a Firefox toolbar (there's also an ancient and crude IE toolbar too) or just straight through the Web.
My wife and I have been using it for over a year now, I never got around to doing anything like a public release. You're more than welcome to give it a go, if you wish.
http://websticky.net/
Let me know if you'd like an "invitation" (yeah, got that idea from a certain Search provider turned Mail provider). I'm not entirely sure that the invite system survive the change of hosting providers.
Worse yet, sometimes I'll bookmark a page and go back to it, and the page will be gone, the site down, or changed to something which isn't useful to me.
I use http://www.furl.net/ which satisfies the requirement mentioned: "a good solution would have to keep copies, not just references". Furl lets you save the text of the page you have visited, as well as the link. It saves them on the furl server, so you can furl from any machine. I notice that Furl has become less popular. I don't know whether people moved to http://www.spurl.net/ instead. I think the pdf solution may be best for the long term.
You can either keep what you save in some sort of logical arrangement,
That's the best idea. The filesystem is the most robust database I've found and hierarchies work well for me.
This story would be saved in 'computers > networking > internet > sites > slashdot.org > stories > ask > obvious', for instance.
Anything I come up with goes on the blog. In theory, then somebody could do the same (were there people who cared to read what I write).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's not worth archiving everything. But what you do archive, you should archive properly and carefully. All interesting information falls into two groups:
Indexing and archiving and maintaining their own bibliography is what researchers do to stay on top of things and there is no way around it (unless you are in a position to use your underlings for this purpose.) You may want to capture the author(s), date, title, URL, some keywords, a clickable or copyable path to your local PDF copy, and perhaps the abstract or executive summary.
Over time you will learn what to archive yourself and what to ignore. You will also find that for every handful of documents, only one is important and insightful and worth archiving while the others simply reference or paraphrase the original document. This is basically the 80/20 rule and it holds regardless of the subject area. -- Murphy's law states that you will only find this document after you've indexed all the others... but that's life for you. ;)
--Bud
KDE bug 140983 .