Live data from Hacker News

WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

getmemex.com

41–50 of 215 posts

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#41

This 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?

If I need to save a page I've read on mobile, I mail myself the link to my desktop and print it there, where the PDF Archive lives. Its muscle memory at this point.

Still, would be nice if the Browser vendors would cotton on to how powerful this is, and make the whole thing a bit more seamless for the mobile/desktop bridge, or just make Print-to-PDF work more smoothly for this case on mobile.

Either way, I also have a list of every mail I've ever sent myself containing a URL from mobile, which is handy in and of itself at times, hehe ..

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#42
post #2

I'm excited for this resurgence of archiving, searching, highlighting, bookmarking, note-taking, etc

I want a self-hosted version of something like this. I currently use historio.us, which is one of the only services I pay for, but I'd much rather have a good self hosted option. I've been looking for years.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#43
post #37

This 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…

I use Safari and Firefox mostly, and haven't yet run into any of the issues you bring up - pdftotext gives me full text search with ease. All the links still work, PDF's are easy to read (assuming the page doesn't do weird layout tricks), and for the worst case, I at least can search my "bookmark" PDF archive and go back to the original live web page if needed.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#44

Something I noticed when I use "Read Later" style applications to save pages is that I will, most of the time, forget about how I arrived at a certain page. This is important to me because it gives me the context to decide a perspective on the page. If I was able to save pages while also knowing where I found them and maybe make a comment about why I found it interesting, then I would be able to organize my knowledge…

https://histre.com/ has tree-style web history, taking notes on those web pages, and more. Disclaimer: I'm the founder. It automatically creates a knowledge base for you. The paths you took to arrive at a piece of information is just one part of the puzzle that it puts together for you. The main idea is that we throw away a lot of the signal we generate while doing things online and this can be put to good use for ou…

How are you planning to attack mobile use? More than half my browsing happens on mobile now!

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#45
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Safari for the win! ;)

(Seems like a bug in Firefox to me.. maybe this should be a config option..)

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#46

This 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?

Sounds like a product idea. I can imagine a service that uses google puppeteer on a server somewhere to print a pdf of a URL and then emailing it to the user.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I need to save a page I've read on mobile, I mail myself the link to my desktop and print it there, where the PDF Archive lives. Its muscle memory at this point. Still, would be nice if the Browser vendors would cotton on to how powerful this is, and make the whole thing a bit more seamless for the mobile/desktop bridge, or just make Print-to-PDF work more smoothly for this case on mobile. Either way, I also have…

On iOS you can easily create a shortcut for the share-sheet to creat pdf prints fyi

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#49

This 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…

nothing beats print-to-PDF

What's the advantage over browser's built-in 'save entire page' option? Print to PDF loses formatting and obscures the URL you got the thing from.

Re: WorldBrain's Memex: Bookmarking for the power users of the web

#50
post #7

Does it capture the web content I view? Or just index it to retrieve the web at it's original URL later?

For full text search it has to save the text obviously, but right now you sadly can't retrieve it.

It's on top of the roadmap though :) https://www.notion.so/Release-Notes-Roadmap-262a367f7a2a48ff...

Post reply on HN