Fork webpages?

[justice]

I’m looking for something a bit unusual. Say you are following the instructions for installing a software package (rl example: http://library.linod...in/installing-webmin). Now you find out the instructions are outdated, or incomplete.

How do you keep your notes/additional instructions together with the original? Now you have two problems, your instructions and the original can be updated independently. What happens when the original is updated, or a new version of the software is released?

Wouldn’t it be great if you could fork the webpage and update it (or even submit a pull request to the maintainer)?

Is there any practical way of working this way – or will I be stuck with a notetaker / blog / bunch of outdated textfiles?

A lot of questions – maybe one of you has the answer.

[IainB]

I have a similar requirement. The way I approach this is currently using Firefox:

• Scrapbook: Capture pages and save them "frozen in time", by copying them with the Scrapbook add-on. These copies create files which form part of my laptop's hard drive Library and can be indexed/searched using desktop tools as well as using the Scrapbook add-on's index/search.
• Update Scanner: Monitor those web pages where I want to be notified of changes, by using the Update Scanner add-on - I haven't needed to use this very much so have not got much experience with it.

Google Reader may be of help as well:

• I have often found that most/many web pages have an RSS feed if you hunt for it. I subscribe these into Google Reader (a feed aggregator). If there is no RSS feed, then Google Reader tries very hard to find an RSS feed for each of the URLs that you feed it with, and tells you if it can't find one. If it can't, then there are also several web-based tools which can be used to generate an RSS feed URL for a given web page URL, so you can use those RSS feeds in Google Reader instead.
• Once you have the RSS feed in Google Reader, you will be able to see new posts or content for those web pages in Google Reader. There are add-ons for Google Reader that enable you to filter out and hide duplicates, so that you can be presented with just the most recent changes/posts to a given web page. You can then either get a Google Reader view revealing all the hidden posts, or bring up the actual web page and scroll back to see all the changes - whichever approach you prefer.

Hope this helps or is of use. None of it is really an ideal answer.

[justice]

I guess you can capture it with onenote, evernote etc, diigo. But if there was a webservice where you could see everyone's comments/updates on the pages that would rock. usually someone will have done the work.