How Do You Keep Track of Your Web-Based Research? 150
time961 asks: "I use the Web extensively to research a wide variety of topics (weird, huh?). However, much of the time I end up printing out web pages and filing them on paper, because that's the easiest way I know to say 'OK, that was interesting, I'll hold on to it until I actually do something about this topic'. Often, I'll run across something that seems relevant to a long-term project or interest and just want to grab it without even reading the details. Paper is OK for reading, browsing, and scribbling, but it's hard to search, it's heavy, and it's wasteful (and I yearn for a day when browsers can reliably print what's on the screen, instead of cutting it off at the margin because some designer doesn't understand layout!). How do others deal with organizing the results of browsing?"
Bookmarks and histories aren't the answer — they're not very good for searching, the UI isn't very good for, say, adding notes, and they don't work offline. Also, stale URLs are a huge problem — a key advantage of paper is that it doesn't randomly fade out in a few days (or decades), so a good solution would have to keep copies, not just references. I imagine something like a FireFox plug-in with a 'Remember This' button and some options for category, keywords, annotations, etc., but I'll bet there are more creative approaches, too."
PDF (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
You can either keep what you save in some sort of logical arrangement, or trust your handy desktop search engine to find it for you later (though that seems to reduce the problem back to finding the info in the first place, though at least you don't need to worry about the content going offline at some future date.
Take a look at the ScrapBook Firefox extension (Score:5, Informative)
You can find all the features in a nice list [vis.ne.jp] at the official homepage with tons of pretty screenshots. There's even a 50 page manual [vis.ne.jp] (PDF) created by Andrew Giles-Peters.
Even though development has seemingly halted since December 2005, it's still one of the most well rounded extensions for Firefox I've come across yet.
I wget it! (Score:4, Informative)
At the moment, I have on order of 10GB just of websites, radio clips, and what have you that I have used for previous research. Not only that but I can also maintain a simple directory structure and never have to worry that that "firefox plugin" will still be compatible with version 4.765.
Another neat function is you can specify just a particular files (www.whatever.com/pic.jpg), or all the files with a particular extension *.jpg, or only the files in that directory. You can also use it to spider (limited) all the links on a site. Though be kind and don't do this too often, as I am sure it eats a lot of bandwidth.
The last (and greatest) thing, is it remains in a well-known and easily editable format.
Alternatively, I have also used a MediaWiki setup so that I could drop down notes for classes, or other interesting things in it, but this required substantially more overhead than wget.
DEVONthink (Score:2, Informative)
Using a good PDF exporter (I'm on OS X, so look elsewhere for free & easy ways to do this on Windows), DEVONthink will pretty much keep everything organized like a digital filing cabinet.
'Course, the cheapest version costs $39.95, but I can attest to the fact that this software WORKS (I got it heavily discounted in the MacHeist 2006 bundle).
Re:Recommend good free PDF printer? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Recommend good free PDF printer? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PDF (Score:3, Informative)
For Windows, I can recommend the following free solutions:
Hope this helps...
Re:PDF (Score:3, Informative)
For Windows there's either the paid route (Adobe Acrobat Suite), or you can use PDFCreator [sourceforge.net] which uses ghostscript. GS used to produce really nasty looking output years ago on Windows (circa the late 90's), but that's not the case anymore.
For linux, print to ps then use something like ps2pdf (once again GhostScript).
New: Google Notebook (Score:5, Informative)
Re:PDF (Score:3, Informative)
That's it, the printer stores the PDF files by default to ~/PDF but you can change this location in
Re:Errrr (Score:4, Informative)
Ask and ye shall receive!
http://bookmarkdd.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]
Or the Mozilla Addons page for it :
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15
Re:New: Google Notebook (Score:2, Informative)
I was surprised not to see Google Notebook as one of the first answers, as it indeed works very well for organizing material found on the web. I guess, Slashdot is less of a Google fan club than many people assume it to be!
The FF extension makes saving "permanent" pages easy via a right-click option. For pages that may become inaccessible over time, the content of interest can be copy-pasted directly into the Notebook entry. And Google search options coupled with the possibility of creating multiple Notebooks (and sections within each Notebook) make sorting and reorganizing notes very straightforward.
Evernote (Score:3, Informative)
It's a program that allows you to easily save a copy of just about anything (certainly anything on the web...) with links to the original and everything else. The notes are automatically stored in chronological order for browsing. You can also apply tags to your liking and it has full search capabilities as well. It's free for the regular version, if you want to import handwritten notes and have them be searchable as well there's a charge.
It's awesome and I think fits your needs exactly, or at least I use it to meet the needs you described and I've had no problems with it.
Now if I could just force myself to go back and do something with the research later...
P.S. There's a writer in The Atlantic named James Fallows who has a column on useful technology tools. That's where I first learned of Evernote. He had several other suggestions to fit the bill in that column and more generally, he's usually worth a read.
Re:Zotero (Score:2, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Zoot (Score:3, Informative)
OneNote 2007 (Score:3, Informative)
It comes with a "print to..." driver so you can print to your OneNote notebook, and provides a good framework for organizing your notes, and you don't need to kill as many trees as printing to paper.
Another possibility is to get a PDF printer; you can either just organize your notes with file system folders, or if you want something a little bit more useful to track relations between different items, you can use something like PersonalBrain [thebrain.com] to for organization.
Copy URL + helps a lot (Score:3, Informative)
Copy URL +
"The Copy URL+ extension enables you to copy to the clipboard the current
document's address along with additional information such as the document's
title, the current selection or both."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12
It installs a context-menu, allowing you to copy any or all of page title, URL, and most importantly: the text currently selected.
At other times, I use bookmarks in a new folder specific to the subject. You can add keywords to bookmarks in FF.