Some of my favorites.
So if I'm going to be productive, I'm going to have to limit my playing around,
and find tools that actually allow me to store and access the useful information
I find on the web, and find it quckly and easily.
My Links bar has numerous buttons which bear witness
to my various attempts to find solutions to this problem. Some of those buttons
are still in use, others long forgotten, while the functions of yet others have
been superceded by the Google Toolbar, yet still hold their place on the Links
bar.
When I first started using Net Snippets
I was delighted. Here was a tool that seemed to allow me to do precisely what
I'd dreamed of. Instead of saving entire pages (and/or bookmarking them) I clipped
only those parts that I wanted from a page, and even diligently organized those
snippets in logical categories. But my guess is that I started using this tool
when my web habits had already become too well established. It wasn't that I couldn't
teach myself new tricks, but that in order to make my snippets files truly worthwhile
to me I would have to go through the vast amount of pages I'd previous bookmarked
and clip to snippets the parts that I wanted. There's no doubt that this is a
great tool, but if I can't bring myself to finish the job of cleaning up my hard
drive, I can hardly be expected to review all my bookmarks and move what I want
to save to my snippets files.
Just recently I've discovered Furl and am delighted
with it. Here's a tool that not only allows me to save articles online (without
fear of linkrot) but also to index them by keyword and search what I've saved
online. It's a great tool that I've used numerous times over the past month. But
I've got to admit that my experience with tools of this sort suggests that after
a flurry of use I tend to forget about them, and chances are good that this will
happen with this tool as well.
Of course an opposite take on this could also be a solution. Personal AltaVista
was, for instance, a wonderful tool for retrieving whatever I had on my hard drive.
Essentially it was a local AltaVista search engine on my hard drive. A couple
of years ago someone found my request for that program
and sent it to me, but it proved to be incompatible with (wouldn't you know it)
newer operating systems. Rumor has it that Google intended to make a similar tool
available for similar use (for free) and I'm waiting - quite impatiently - but
pleasantly surprised.
With Gmail, however, Google has at least given
me a wonderful solution to online storage, and because the interface is one of
search rather than of files, if I squint a bit (and if I didn't have Furl available
to me) I can use a tool such as this for keeping track of my bookmarks. I only
rarely use my Gmail account for correspondence. Instead, I send URLs to myself,
describing what the page I'm sending deals with in the Subject line of my letter.
Then, when I open my account I run a search on the terms I want to find, and links
to the relevant pages show up. Considering that almost all of the tools I once
used for online storage have faded into the black holes of cyberspace, this particular
tool has become very useful, even if I don't use it as a mail account as Google
perhaps "intended".
Go to: Putting the web to work, or
Go to: Saving a digital copy, or
Go to: Designing a work-oriented environment, or
Go to: Tools I've known and loved ... and often abandoned.