Does it capture the web content I view? Or just index it to retrieve the web at it's original URL later?
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WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
31–40 of 215 posts
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#32This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…
It's too bad browsers don't have an easy way to print to browser-page-sized PDF. Standard 8.5x11/A4 paper sized PDFs of webpages tend to look pretty terrible.
I used to use the Scrapbook plugin for Firefox but I realized for the most part just plaintext might be best. So I'm in the process of setting up a workflow that will save article in markdown in one click and sync between my phone and my computer.
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#33What is WorldBrain?
More details:
https://community.worldbrain.io/t/data-sovereignty-and-priva...
https://medium.com/bettersharing/steward-ownership-is-capita...
edit: corrected 1st link
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#34This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…
It's too bad browsers don't have an easy way to print to browser-page-sized PDF. Standard 8.5x11/A4 paper sized PDFs of webpages tend to look pretty terrible. I used to use the Scrapbook plugin for Firefox but I realized for the most part just plaintext might be best. So I'm in the process of setting up a workflow that will save article in markdown in one click and sync between my phone and my computer.
Reader View is the solution to the A4- problem, imho. But I honestly don't mind the rendering issue - this is just a reference repository, after all. If I really need the cleaner page, I either Reader-View it beforehand, or just open it up on the Web again - links are preserved in PDF.
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just use the PDF defaults from whatever browser I'm using at the time. Nothing special involved, just the defaults. I do use 'pdftotext' to do more fine-grained searching if I need to - but for the most part I find that a simple "ls -l | grep " suffices, since this method preserves page title text too .. I did the same thing for this thread and had no issues with this command, whatsoever: $ pdftotext WorldBrain\'s\…
Got it, makes sense.
> EDIT: Seeing the command-line you're using, the search you do is over the files' names, correct? The PDF/(original web page) text content is not indexed, right? Just to make sure I understand correctly.
pdftotext gets the actual text from the PDF. I don't do this, but I'm sure that you could automate the process of generating a text file for each PDF in a directory with pdftotext and then ripgrep the text files when it's time to search the contents. That would be doable with a makefile or a couple of shell scripts.
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got it, makes sense.
> EDIT: Seeing the command-line you're using, the search you do is over the files' names, correct? The PDF/(original web page) text content is not indexed, right? Just to make sure I understand correctly. pdftotext gets the actual text from the PDF. I don't do this, but I'm sure that you could automate the process of generating a text file for each PDF in a directory with pdftotext and then ripgrep the text files whe…
Yeah, my computer is fast enough that I can just do "find . -name '*.pdf' -exec pdftotext {} \; | grep -i someSearchTerm" and come back later. Bonus points that it stays in my Terminal for reference later in the day as needed.
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#37This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…
Do you use a Chromium-based browser? Chrome/ium's Print-To-PDF uses quite a different (better) method for generating the PDF compared to the OS-level Print-To-PDF.
The OS-level PDF converter can lose a lot of information. Especially hyperlinks are not present in the PDF when it's generated through a print driver.
Unfortunately, this is one of the few times when it sucks to be a Firefox user, because it doesn't have a builtin Print-To-PDF.
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#38Wow, I have been looking for just this tool. First, the ability to highlight and save interesting passages on the web. Second, something to give me value from my own browsing history. Third, an honest, open, paid service that aspires to the vision of the original Memex. I really hope this succeeds.
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#39This is still not as powerful as my one, simple trick to handle all bookmarks, ever: Print to PDF. I've been doing it since last century, and I have 10's of thousands of PDF's of every single web page I've ever found interesting, sitting right there in a directory on my computer. Its indexable, searchable, grok'able, available off-line, allows me to harvest data without fuss, and gives me access to anything I can rem…
This is amazingly simple, but what about in mobile? There's pdf printing here too but it's not as simple as command P! Any ideas?
Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's too bad browsers don't have an easy way to print to browser-page-sized PDF. Standard 8.5x11/A4 paper sized PDFs of webpages tend to look pretty terrible. I used to use the Scrapbook plugin for Firefox but I realized for the most part just plaintext might be best. So I'm in the process of setting up a workflow that will save article in markdown in one click and sync between my phone and my computer.
Reader View is the solution to the A4- problem, imho. But I honestly don't mind the rendering issue - this is just a reference repository, after all. If I really need the cleaner page, I either Reader-View it beforehand, or just open it up on the Web again - links are preserved in PDF.
Links are only preserved if you use Chrome's PDF export... This is not true for Firefox. (At least on Windows. I haven't tried Firefox on macOS.)