Fastest way to get web snippets into an outline

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Posted by Nicholas Kormanik
Jan 22, 2015 at 04:22 AM

So many outline products have been mentioned. For the moment I’m wondering how a snippet on some random web page can be transferred over into an outline.

No doubt, there are other considerations in outline program choice.

But, for now, what program offers fast and efficient web page snippet to outline action?

Perhaps mention your favorite outline program, and say how you achieve getting some web page snippet (or 1000) into that program.

Thanks,
Nicholas Kormanik

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 22, 2015 at 01:02 PM

Nicholas Kormanik wrote:
>wondering how a snippet on some random web page can be transferred over
>into an outline.
>what program offers fast and efficient web page snippet to
>outline action?

It depends whether you just want plain text or you also need to capture formatting, images and web page elements, incl. time stamp and URL.

For plain text, the quickest way probably is to use an outliner that has a clipboard capture feature, so upon hitting CTRL+C the selected text is automatically pasted into the software. I just use NoteTab for that (in case any further cleaning up is needed, such as joining broken lines) and then paste the snippets into position into whatever outliner I’m using.

As for the latter, it’s still Surfulater for me.

Posted by DataMill
Jan 25, 2015 at 02:44 PM

You might take a look at Diigo (https://www.diigo.com). It uses simple outlines, to which you can add web clips. The outlines can be exported to the clipboard and used elsewhere.It has a free and Pro version for $60/year. It also permits tagging of articles and allows you to upload pdf’s, annotate them and then extract your annotations.

-Mike

Posted by 22111
Jan 25, 2015 at 03:18 PM

“No doubt, there are other considerations in outline program choice.”

Well said.

I discussed this in length before over here, and in short, you always should distinguish between outliners’ (missing) features you cannot replace by external scripting, and those you can, and then, the real comparison between outliners according to your criteria should be made by, what can be realized with it, and what cannot.

In fact, some outliners come with “save webpage” functionality, and in every single instance, I was literally appalled by their respective poverty of delivering results.

Also, bear in mind that while writing a scriptlet for just putting some text selection (i.e. “snippets”) in the outliner of your choice is very easy*, most of these outliners try instead, and more or less successfully that is, to serve you the whole page in question, and with all due respect, please allow me to question the possible absence of any hygiene consideration in such an approach.

As for Andy, I read his “for my, it’s Surfulater” recurrently now, within just some hours, and people reading this should perhaps be aware that there are quite some issues with that program, and also with its German counterpart (based on Access); NEW info here would have been, is there any third program downloading and storing single web pages (i.e. no scraping), AND doing it better than those two?

* = As I said here before, this snippets-retrieving is even possible behind the scenes, both as a new item or as an addendum to the last-created resp. current item in your outliner - in ANY outliner -, i.e. without the need of switching on-screen to your outliner, and then back to your web browser.

In one word, retrieving text snippets should not be of ANY consideration in your choosing your outliner or any other IMS.

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