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Surfulater sale coming up
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Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 24, 2012 at 01:56 PM
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/surfulater/
Posted by Mitchell Kastner
Jun 24, 2012 at 10:46 PM
Perhaps it is just I but I am dashed if I can export any of the web snippets to anything much less a Word file. What is the point of storing this retrieved data if I cannot export it into a wordprocessing document. I grant the snippets are lovely to look at but I actually need to use them in academic articles or legal briefs. I venture that I have been crimping longer than almost all——KAMAS on a Kaypro running CP/M——but I need to convert the outline with note/page into a Word document which one can do with the MS Word Outliner add-in which has been on siesta for almost a year if I remember correctly. UR has a magnificent web capture add-in but since I grabbed snippets from case law on Google Scholar and since for whatever reason UR could not export them, it was a no go for a legal reseach tool. Surfalator exports nothing to Word or PDF. Again it organizes the snippets attractively, but I need to do something productively with them and I cannot see how other than copying them into the MS Word Outliner.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 25, 2012 at 12:59 AM
Mitchell Kastner wrote:
>Perhaps it is just I but I am dashed if I can export any of the web snippets to anything
>much less a Word file. What is the point of storing this retrieved data if I cannot
>export it into a wordprocessing document. I grant the snippets are lovely to look at
>but I actually need to use them in academic articles or legal briefs. I venture that I
>have been crimping longer than almost all——KAMAS on a Kaypro running CP/M——but I
>need to convert the outline with note/page into a Word document which one can do with
>the MS Word Outliner add-in which has been on siesta for almost a year if I remember
>correctly. UR has a magnificent web capture add-in but since I grabbed snippets from
>case law on Google Scholar and since for whatever reason UR could not export them, it
>was a no go for a legal reseach tool. Surfalator exports nothing to Word or PDF. Again it
>organizes the snippets attractively, but I need to do something productively with
>them and I cannot see how other than copying them into the MS Word Outliner.
You could print them as PDFs (if you install a PDF printer driver). Or you could use a clipboard extender like ClipCache (or other free alternatives) to copy a bunch of stuff and then paste them into your preferred PIM/Word processor in one go (just like copying and pasting from actual websites).
According to the Help file the following export options are available:
- Publish entire Knowledge Bases or folders therein to view in a Web Browser, either locally or over the Internet.
- Save articles as either HTML or MHTML files, which can be opened in a Web Browser.
- E-mail Articles to friends and colleagues in HTML format.
- Copy and move Articles and Folders to other Knowledge Bases.
- Access content directly from Surfulater’s XML Knowledge Base.
I’m quite happy with Surfulater as the main database for all my web clippings, but I have low expectations. I don’t do much processing or annotation there (other than the occasional note or highlight), it’s simply a place to keep stuff in and organise them into hierarchical themes. For any further analysis and processing I just copy and paste the relevant stuff into ConnectedText.
Posted by Dr Andus
Jun 25, 2012 at 01:14 AM
P.S. Perhaps I should add that I use Surfulater strictly for one type of data only: and that is web pages and web sites that relate to my empirical data. I don’t use it for academic content. For academic articles and books, I save them as PDFs and link them to the downloaded bibliographic data in EndNote. This way I can separate theory (academic literature) from empirical data.
I use Surfulater for capturing the URLs, snippets of web page content, sometime the entire web page (if I want a permanent record of the look of the web page), sometimes screen shots. It is about keeping a record of the websites I visited that are related to my research, as their content is changing all the time and websites can disappear any minute without warning.
Posted by Mitchell Kastner
Jun 25, 2012 at 12:36 PM
And what do you do with them after you have pasted them into CT? Does CT export to a wordprocessing program?
No to take issue with SZ, I would never do so, but I would welcome Goliath mounting the shoulders of David to perfect a one-stop tool to capture, store, organize, and then ulitmately to export content. I mean to say that serious thinkers analyze data and so far as I know, outlining is the best means to perform analysis. Yes I am addicted and happy to admit it but alas I very often need to get down to hard work and moving among four or five information processors strikes me as a trifle inefficient.