Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 69 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#51

Post by jitl »

I save interesting t stuff to Notion in a “My Links” database for general stuff, “Recipes”, or a “Shopping” database for consumerism. On some items I go back and write notes if I’m in the mood; the draw is quick capture + able to link between items or organize/summarize/synthesize them more later all in the same app. This works okay from all my devices.

The more focused “recipes” and “shopping” DBs have really upped my food and interior design game respectively. I’ve now built up a good library of things I love to make plus my special adaptations that I can sort by effort level and tastiness. With shopping, I tend to slowly build up products for some purpose over months/years, and when I’m ready to spend I can quickly organize all my best options, sort by price, review them with my partner, to make the choice.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#52

Post by mkr-hn »

Springtime wrote: post #8

I save everything I consider useful as an MHTML file (HTML/CSS/images in one file), which is native to Chromium browsers. This has the benefit of the page not being split into separate files as the normal save page does, doesn't break when the file is renamed like the normal save page does (on Windows at least), removes the need for bookmarks which go dead over time, preserves the original source URL in the file for…

MHTML is almost as old as Google and was first implemented by Internet Explorer in 2001. They're identical to .eml files too (it's plain old MIME), so you can load them in your email client if you're so inclined.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#53

Post by [deleted] »

nadrad wrote: post #28

I've never done something like that, but after reading your post and the comments, I'm tempted to start doing so! I'm thinking about a script that receives the URL and saves its main content (e.g., using Mozilla's Readability) in a text file. It also stores the URL on the first line and maybe sends a request to Archive.org to take a snapshot of the page and adds its URL to the second line in the file. Then, whenever…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#54

Post by Santosh83 »

Springtime wrote: post #8

I save everything I consider useful as an MHTML file (HTML/CSS/images in one file), which is native to Chromium browsers. This has the benefit of the page not being split into separate files as the normal save page does, doesn't break when the file is renamed like the normal save page does (on Windows at least), removes the need for bookmarks which go dead over time, preserves the original source URL in the file for…

Not MHTML I guess and not native to the browser, but in Firefox you can use the popular SingleFile addon to save any web page into a single HTML file.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/single-file/

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#55

Post by Springtime »

Santosh83 wrote: post #54
Springtime wrote: post #8

I save everything I consider useful as an MHTML file (HTML/CSS/images in one file), which is native to Chromium browsers. This has the benefit of the page not being split into separate files as the normal save page does, doesn't break when the file is renamed like the normal save page does (on Windows at least), removes the need for bookmarks which go dead over time, preserves the original source URL in the file for…

Not MHTML I guess and not native to the browser, but in Firefox you can use the popular SingleFile addon to save any web page into a single HTML file. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/single-file/

Seems like a decent project, which has come up before. The sibling commenter ramraj07 would likely be interested in what seems like a new feature listed to automatically save pages once loaded, which according to that link works on Firefox for Android (mobile).

Back when Firefox supported the UnMHT addon it would also work on Firefox for Android and had the nice feature of being able to customize which replacement Unicode was used for illegal filename characters (instead of just using underscores like Chromium does and SingleFile says it does).

Btw the comparison table of SingleFile mentions MHTML can't be 'unzipped' to extract the resources but there is an open source program on Windows which can extract the resources called ExtractMHT[1], which later became bundled with Universal Extractor.

[1] https://www.legroom.net/software/extractmht

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#56

Post by dandanua »

In Firefox you can add tags to bookmarks and then search in bookmarks by typing '*' as the first symbol in the address bar. In this way I always can find anything I saw and tagged appropriately.

Though now I'm switching to saving bookmarks locally as folders (sometimes with cached content) named with tags and use custom scripts for searching them (fzf tool is amazing).

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#58

Post by marniewebb »

alexpetralia wrote: post #7

I use a system of personal knowledge management (PKM), which I've posted about before: 1. Capture: every interesting idea that I think up or read is immediately stored in Google Keep (on mobile or laptop). It can be very rough at this point, the goal is simply to not forget. 2. Transcribe & Organize: every weekend, I go through the notes I accumulated during the week. It tends to be between 10 and 30 notes. Sometimes…

My system is very much like this. I capture most things to Drafts app with a “to process” or “to read” tag. And then review and handle at least once a week.

If it’s a resource that I want to refer back to (like how to do something or a tool I found interesting) I keep it in Drafts in a resource workspace appropriately tagged. If it’s a resource I keep and share a lot, I move it into Obsidian and write text around it to make sharing easy.

If it’s a longer item — say a paper that’s building my knowledge in a subject area — I move it into DEVONThink and annotate.

I do need to recall and reuse things and I find having different tools and workflows for different kinds of information helps me.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#59

Post by tamishungry »

I have a "notes.txt" file that I keep at every job. I paste all the links snippets into the note, alongside with my personal note. I use the same file to jot down things I need to do, and also use it as scratchpad.

i find the file to be very easily searchable, even if it has 10k+ lines.

Re: Ask HN: How do you save and browse external interesting URLs?

#60

Post by romain_dardour »

Tried a lot of different approaches, from markdown to notion, to native browser bookmarks. Ended up liking https://anybox.app/ - great cataloging / sorting capabilities and plenty of keyboard control

I don’t have any vested interest in this company - no hidden connection. Just happened to find a nice solution in it.

Post reply on HN