I have a huge library of articles and stories from the web on my PC that was growing out of control. 700 megs worth of knowledge and history that just sits there, backed up on CD. Not anymore. Using ScrapBook, a Firefox extension, I’ve organized my library and now it is a searchable personal reference. Lifehacker has a handy howto.
I need to get around to trying EverNote, a similar free tool with more capability, however, I’ve been looking for a lightweight, simple tool that gets out of my way and lets me work the way I work and ScrapBook is just about perfect. I’m partial to using my file system as a database, I don’t want to need the software to access my library directly. ScrapBook does that and builds a RDF document describing my library’s contents that I can parse for reusing my library in different ways with a little bit of Python or Perl. Shoot, I could simply consume the RDF and library (it’s HTML after all) and build my own UI with minimal effort.
Karl,
I work at EverNote and just ran across your post. I couldn’t resist adding a nudge to encourage you to give EverNote a try. I think you’ll find that it really does provide you with a powerful and yet simple, easy-UI tool that gets out of your way and lets you work the way you want. By the way, in addition to our Web Clipper button available for IE and Firefox today, we’re hoping to ship a version of EverNote soon that includes a Clipper button for Outlook email. Between that, the auto-categorization of your notes, the SmartSearch field that finds notes by keyword as fast as you can type them, and the scrolling tape (so you don’t have to open notes one at a time to find what you’re looking for) EverNote is a delight.
At least, that’s one VERY biased opinion from somebody who works at EverNote!
Cheers!
– Michael
Well how can I turn down a request like that Michael 🙂 I will give it a shot soon.