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."
Zotero (Score:4, Interesting)
A personal wiki? (Score:3, Interesting)
I also save web pages as "Web Page, Complete". It now occurs to me that I should make a specific directory for those pages.
Yojimbo (Score:2, Interesting)
You can either save a "web archive", which is the web page incl. all graphics/css/etc., or a PDF of the page (nicely integrated into print services). Both document types are rendered inside the app and are searchable. Yojimbo has also tags and folders to keep things organised. And you can also save regular notes (formated and with images). Covers all bases.
When it comes to pure PDF, YEP http://www.yepthat.com/ [yepthat.com] is an excellent alternative. Kind of the iPhoto of PDF.
Re:Take a look at the ScrapBook Firefox extension (Score:2, Interesting)
I second this. I MUCH prefer Scrapbook to PDF saves, which I used earlier, because Scrapbook preserves all the original HTML and the format of images (whereas PDF converts them and makes them hard to separate out), is also searchable/indexable by whatever indexing program you want, and can be highlighted, annotated, etc.
Let's just hope they keep developing, at least enough to ensure that it continues to work with future releases of Firefox. My sense is that they are, given that the developers blog at http://www.xuldev.org/blog/ [xuldev.org] is active and indicates that they're looking at Firefox 3 issues.
Re:New: Google Notebook (Score:1, Interesting)
Firefox Bookmarks (Score:3, Interesting)
In my bookmarks folder I have a "Projects" folder.
Within my "Projects" folder I have an alphabetic listing of folders with each project's name.
If the project is small, I fill it directly with book marks. I do take the time to add notes, because if the URL does go stale, the notes will let me know what I'm now missing. More often than not, missing information can be replaced in the future with another URL that has the same or more up-to-date information. Additionally Google Desktop searches my bookmarks file, so I just double-click ctrl and can search via keywords that way.
This whole setup is a bit of a hack, but it's worked. I'm hoping either Firefox 3.0 will have a fantastic bookmark manager or a plug-in author creates something truly wonderful for the existing bookmark system.