How do you mark the internet as "finished"?

Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 30, 2013 at 09:51 AM

I think I’ve understood the problem, and while I can’t pretend to be able to offer “the ultimate” solution, I’ve found the following approach useful.

I use the Windows version of Notebooks (by Alfons Schmid: notebooksapp.com) to copy and save web pages. Notebooks preserves the formatting of web pages almost unchanged, but also allows you to edit the pages (e.g. add comments,highlights, or even rewrite/reformat the things completely, etc.). So a typical Notebooks page consists of:

Title
URL (pasted)
Comments (by me)
Tags (by me)
Contents of web page (pasted)

This means that when I eventually read through the web page, I may decide to cut out bits that aren’t directly relevant to my interests (easy: just select and delete). Other pages I make “read-only” (Notebooks offers that facility) so I can’t change them (e.g. nice bits of writing I want to preserve for my future edification).

Notebooks automatically time-stamps pages anyway, and you can arrange them into folders. The actual pages are held as separate files (an HTML file plus a .plist file for each page, containing the index and references), and Notebooks automatically indexes them for searching (I have to say the iOS app’s search function is much better than the Windows client’s search function, but you can always use Windows Desktop Search or any other search app of your choice; I use Copernic, for example). Notebooks folders are thus actual folders in the file system, which makes Notebooks very “open”.

While this doesn’t obviate the issue of duplicate pages in particular, it does make it very easy to organize pages and delete them, annotate them (using highlights if you wish!), shove ‘em about wherever you want ‘em, and so on. Although it’s a slightly lengthier process than using e.g. Surfulater or Scrapbook, I’ve found it’s more flexible - and unlike Surfulater, Notebooks supports full UTF-8 encoding, so is compatible with most languages. Finally, if you want to manipulate your web pages without reference to Notebooks, you can easily do so in the actual Windows file system (or on a Mac - Notebooks also has a MacOS client).

The Notebooks Windows client is currently free (because it’s still in beta). If you’ve got an iPad, you can synchronize easily via Dropbox (Notebooks defaults to Dropbox in any case); the cost of the iOS app is low (can’t remember what, exactly). Notebooks has, as a result of all the above, become my go-to information repository.