51–60 of 215 posts
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.
I keep wanting to use this because I love the idea, but the implementation last time I tried didn't seem to jive with me. I navigate the web with Tridactyl, and I think some of the keybindings were interfering - which would be my fault. With that being said - I love the idea, and will continue to check every so often on the status of the project :)
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.
^^ first advantage
Also: a) Formatting is not lost, it just changes to fit the default paper size I've got selected (A4) but doesn't really make much difference, since its a snapshot, and b) URL is right there in the Header of the PDF, and is clickable, so no - not really an issue. This archive also functions as a bookmark collection as well as an offline copy for future reference ..
(Disclaimer: may be that your browser is borking the PDF's. Not the case with Safari, anyway, but ymmv..)
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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.
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…
I recently got bitten by that, when I was trying to print out some page in Chrome, and it was rendering as a bunch of white space surrounded by some elements from the page, but without any actual content I cared about. Turns out, my situation isn't that uncommon for pages that are heavily JS-dependent
Note: I am not saying JS=bad. This has nothing to do with JS itself and everything to do with how JS is used to generate/render the page. A lot of pages just don't bother with doing it the right way that doesn't screw up generated PDFs.
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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
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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!
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…
I would be careful with using this method and check the generated PDF versions with your eyes before writing them off as "all is good, it is archived now". I recently got bitten by that, when I was trying to print out some page in Chrome, and it was rendering as a bunch of white space surrounded by some elements from the page, but without any actual content I cared about. Turns out, my situation isn't that uncommon f…
And although I do occasionally check the produced PDF's, the layout doesn't matter to me at all since I use a cmd-line grep or combination of 'pdftotext' to find the page, open the PDF, and click the link to go to the original web page if I need to .. haven't found a single dud PDF in the collection in a randomised sampling, but then again in 20,000+ files, there's bound to be one that didn't make it through the rendering pipeline, but so far, hasn't been an issue.
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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.
Looks like Apple's implementation is a bit better then. I just tried on Windows and I definitely don't get any clickable links when printed with the OS print-to-pdf driver. (I do get them with Chrome's save-to-pdf feature which circumvents "printing" and generates the PDF itself.)
Either way, haven't used Windows in decades, so its a non-issue, but it is interesting to note that this isn't something I'd be doing if I did switch.
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…