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."

Comments

PDF

[daeg]

First off, install a good PDF printer.

Media Server

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Zotero

[Fruny]

I imagine something like a FireFox plug-in with a 'Remember This' button and some options for category, keywords, annotations, etc.

Sounds like Zotero is what you're looking for.

Easy

[aadvancedGIR]

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.

PDF!

[megabyte405]

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!

Take a look at the ScrapBook Firefox extension

[BruceCage]

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."

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension created by Gomita (some Japanese fella), it allows you "capture" web pages, creating a locally stored cache and offers the ability to easily remove content from the captured web page, mark sections or add notes. It also has a whole bunch of tools such as full text search and a pretty intuitive interface.

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.

I wget it!

[VE3OGG]

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.

Re:Recommend good free PDF printer?

[patelbhavesh]

PDFCreator is a free open source pdf printer http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator

New: Google Notebook

[kestasjk]

Something that recently came out of Google and is ideal for this task; Google Notebook. You find sites with Google, now you can take notes from them with Google, and it integrates nicely into Google search. Unlike bookmarks you can search the notes you take and have the URLs ready and waiting, etc.

1. Why would I want to use Google Notebook?

With Google Notebook, you can browse, clip, and organize information from across the web in a single online location that's accessible from any computer. Planning a trip? Researching a product? Just add clippings to your notebook. You won't ever have to leave your browser window.

2. How do I get started?

Simple. Just sign in to the Google Notebook homepage with your Google Accounts username and password, then download the Google Notebook browser extension (if you haven't already). As soon as you restart your browser, you'll see a Google Notebook icon in the bottom-right corner of your browser window. Click on this icon to open your mini Google Notebook, where you can save all the clips of content you want.

Re:Errrr

[XenoPhage]

Maybe something in Firefox one day that'll tell you that your bookmarking something again?

Ask and ye shall receive!

http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/

Or the Mozilla Addons page for it :

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/155 3