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

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

#71

Post by GuiA »

fit2rule wrote: post #27
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you should productize this idea. I would use it. It's a bit hassle to print to PDF every time, but if the barrier is low enough, it would be useful.

There's nothing to productize. You just use CMD[,Control}-P, select "Print to PDF", save to a relevant folder, and off you go. If that's too many steps, use Automator or whatever the equivalent is on your OS to make a shorter hotkey. (I had a Hammerspoon script for this once, but reverted to just doing it manually, since my muscle memory on the keystrokes is sufficiently well trained that it supplants my desire to fi…

That’s the software economy we’re in. Everyone’s thinking in terms of “productization” and “features” and “user journeys”. Only old grumpy hackers care about minimal, composable tools anymore. Sigh.

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

#72

Post by pvg »

fit2rule wrote: post #65
pvg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can grep the saved archives and they often save working copies of local interactive content in a way PDF doesn't. Internal structure and annotation is also preserved. I'm not sure I understand the formatting comment, you seem to be saying formatting is not lost and supporting that with an example of how formatting is lost. Don't get me wrong, it should definitely be easier to save, index and otherwise manipulate…

It depends on the site - but I haven't found 'lost formatting' to be an issue at all - since, when I want to do a granular search I'm using 'pdftotext' to search on plaintext, and when I find a PDF of interest, I open it and can go directly back to the web page from which it was printed by way of the footer/header which contains a clickable URL. Most of the time though, the formatting isn't an issue. It depends on th…

Ok, so we seem to agree print-to-pdf loses formatting. I share your interest in and fascination with this (weirdly irksome and edgecasey) problem but just about any modern browser provides better facilities for saving web pages with higher fidelity than 'print to pdf'. Print to pdf is so easy to beat, you'd have to go out of your way to find a way to not-beat it - say, saving just 'page source'.

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

#73

Post by throwawaysea »

fit2rule wrote: post #18

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…

Are you manually printing each page to PDF? I would love to have an automated way to do this but haven't figured out how to deal with logging into subscription based site and all that.

There is also some degree of messiness even with printing to PDF. For example let's say I want to save an HN or Reddit discussion along with the comments - I would need to make sure I capture all the comments that overflow to "More" on HN or are behind a "load more comments" link on Reddit. Is there any elegant way to traverse all that and capture it?

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

#76

Post by ohlookabird »

I really like my self-hosted Wallabag for this. There are browser extensions for Firefox and Chromium (and possibly other) and works well on my Android phone and online. It's a nice layout and most websites work well with it. I use it both for bookmarking and as read-it-later tool. Kudos to the devs!

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

#78

Post by andrepd »

fit2rule wrote: post #18

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…

How is this "not as powerful"? What is this tool lacking that save to pdf provides? I can see at least one way it is vastly inferior, in that you break formatting by converting to a horrendous paper page-based format.

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

#79

Post by wlesieutre »

ropeladder wrote: post #32
fit2rule wrote: post #18

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…

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.

Safari on iPhone can do this:

https://images.macrumors.com/t/zbOsBhKGQj6VvA9oq8KaZkLxXUc=/...

(note the scrollable preview at right edge of screen, the main preview is only showing a small fraction of the document)

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

#80

Post by ropeladder »

jannes wrote: post #61
ropeladder wrote: post #32

Earlier 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.

You could try the awesome SingleFile extension: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile It might be a good compromise between PDF and plain text. It's pretty nice because it essentially serialises a snapshot of the current DOM tree, so it works with all kinds of JS-generated pages. The files should be relatively grep-able, because it's normal HTML. Of course, you might want to strip HTML tags for more sophistica…

SingleFile is a really great extension, but I wanted something a bit more pared down that I could easily use on both mobile and desktop and sync between them using Syncthing. So I'm trying to copy some of SingleFile's UI and graft it on to Markdown-Clipper.[1] And also add the ability to save the images that get picked up by Readability (which Markdown-Clipper uses).

[1] https://github.com/enrico-kaack/markdown-clipper

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