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How do you mark the internet as "finished"?
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Posted by Wayne K
Sep 29, 2013 at 02:41 AM
This is a nagging problem that I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory answer for. I’ve finally settled on a reliable system for capturing net information but I don’t know how to keep track of what’s done. I tend to capture articles willy nilly then organize them later. The problem is, how do I keep track of what I’ve already captured? Right now I’m looking at a huge archive of interesting articles. I’ll probably want to capture dozens of them. How do I mark articles as “finished” (ie captured).
I know that I can keep my articles organized in a file manager and before capturing an article I can search in the file manager to see if I already have it, but that’s a pain.
The ideal solution would be to highlight the article link or attach a note to the web page that says “Done”. The note would then appear whenever I visit the page again.
There are some possible solutions but they’ve been frustrating to use. I thought the new, “improved” Diigo toolbar might do it but I’m already sick of it. The Stickies program allows you to attach notes to windows but I doubt that it’s set up to handle thousands of notes. I’ve tried half a dozen other “highlighting” programs but nothing worked very well.
It’s not a big issue for current research because I can usually remember what I’ve captured. But if I take up research that was done months ago, I have no idea what I’ve already gathered.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Wayne
Posted by Cassius
Sep 29, 2013 at 05:46 AM
Don’t know if this might help, but…:
For each new article you save, include in the file name one or more key words, prefixing each with something like @@.
Keep a key word list in WordPad , some PIM, or whatever, adding to it as you create new key words. Resort the list so it remains alphabetized. Or use a two-pane PIM with categories in the left pane and for each category the appropriate @@keywords in the right pane.
When you want to find files corresponding to one or a combination of keywords, use a free, fast file search program such as MasterSeeker.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Sep 29, 2013 at 08:39 AM
Wayne, you could try a tool such as the Google Chrome extension Note Anywhere. I copy from the description: “with this ext, you can make notes on any web page, any position. When you open that page again, the notes get loaded automatically.”
So, when you capture a page, you should make a note such as “Captured” in Note Anywhere. When you visit the page again (in Chrome) the note will be there, and you will know that you have the page already in your files.
Posted by Wayne K
Sep 29, 2013 at 03:06 PM
Cassius,
That looks like a good way to check for duplicates but I’m hoping to avoid the extra steps each time I want to capture an article.
Posted by Wayne K
Sep 29, 2013 at 03:15 PM
Alexander,
That’s what I’m looking for. Unfortunately, it’s a Chrome extension and I use Firefox or IE to capture articles. I like to convert webpages to PDF’s. This can be done by printing the webpage to PDF in any browser but the results are inconsistent (some pages won’t print at all while others have jumbled text, etc).
For Internet Explorer I use a “Convert” add-on that came with my Adobe Pro software. It does an excellent job of capturing pages just as they appear online.
Recently, I found something I like even better: a Firefox add-on called “Print Pages to PDF”. It’s not quite as consistent as the IE add-on but I really like the job it does in automatically naming the files, which saves a step. It displays a list of recent captures in a sidebar but doesn’t tell you if you’re capturing a duplicates (it creates a second copy with a suffix).
I haven’t found a Chrome add-on that does a similar job with pdf’s. If I could find one, that would solve the problem—or if I could find a Firefox add-on as good as Note Anywhere.
I guess a browser add-on is the only thing that’s going to work but it’s not ideal because there seems to be a rapid turnover in add-ons. They stop being supported then stop working with browser updates.