How Do You Keep Track of Your Web-Based Research?

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!

[megabyte405]

Any time someone mentions how they don't like having papers around but want a hard copy, my response is immediately, print it to PDF! Your operating system should be able to do this :) Linux firefox, print to generic printer to a file named something.ps, then run ps2pdf on it, in just about every other GNOME app PDF support is built in to the print dialog. Mac OS X, well, you already knew you could save PDF (or save the preview, same diff) from your print dialog. Windows: www.sf.net/projects/pdfcreator is your friend - just don't install their toolbar (the existence of which makes me rather sad). Then, you've got the page (or whatever) archived in a nice, portable, paper-like file, and when desktop search is ready for the masses (if you're not on a Mac), you'll even be able to search it - much better than paper!

Randomly enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has the answer to this one. One Note [microsoft.com]. It's absolutely magnificent for stuff like that. There are some other programs which take similar stabs at the same problem, Treepad, Infomagic, and, of course, Google Notebook [google.com]. But One Note wins this one walking away.

Opera Notes

[Gorgeous Si]

In Opera you can select some text in a webpage, then right-click and select "Copy to note" (Shift-Ctrl-C). Notes are stored in a panel, and double clicking a note will load the webpage it came from. Handy.

Re:Take a look at the ScrapBook Firefox extension

[GiMP]

I also second this (me too!)

In years past, I used PDFs, but since 2003, I have been using scrapbook.

Personally, I use it for vacations and business trips. When I'm on on the road, I just 'scrapbook' important pages (like Google map directions) and when I need to pull something up, I just open the laptop. Now, on the other hand, its a lot easier to pull the PDF files over to your PDA...

Now-a-days, I use this less frequently due to the rise of high speed cellular internet, but its still extremely useful for times that I leave my coverage area.

Re:I wget it!

[huckda]

good luck if it's a ruby on rails site...and possibly any other database driven site dynamically created
you pretty much only get what is in the 'public' directory
stylesheets, javascript, images...