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Reliable web page capture...

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johnk:
I'm not actually familiar with Ultra Recall but I'm wondering - seeing as it now has good web capture, is it simply a case of you looking for the best out there, or is there something in particular missing in UR?

Tying in with that question, I'm also curious what you mean by "information management" as said in first post
-tomos (July 16, 2008, 03:57 PM)
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Good questions -- wish I could give a clear answer! I don't think my needs are very complicated. You're right -- now that Ultra Recall has sorted out web capture, it's a very strong contender. The only question mark over UR is speed, which I'd define here as "snappiness" (is that a word?). I used UR for quite a while in versions 1 and 2, and it always had niggling delays in data capture. Nothing horrendous, but saving web pages was a good example -- it would always take a few seconds longer than any other program to save a page.

I haven't used v3.5a long enough to make a decision, and I still have an open mind. But I have noticed, for example, that when you open some stored (archived) pages, loading them takes quite a few seconds. A little dialog pops up saying "please wait -- creating temporary item file". You have plenty of time to read it. Scrapbook or LWA load stored pages pretty much instantly (as they should).

I use information management as a slightly more elegant way of saying "data dump". Somewhere I can stick short, medium and long-term data, text and images, everything from project research to software registration data. I want that data indexed and tagged. I want the database to be scalable. Not industrial strength, but I want it to hold a normal person's data, work and personal, over several years without choking.

The more I search, the more I think that looking for one piece of software to do everything is silly, and maybe even counter-productive. When I think about the pieces of software I most enjoy using, they tend to do one simple task well.  AM-Notebook as my note-taker, for example. Not flawless, but a nice, small focused program (and interestingly, by the same person/team as LWA).

Slightly off the beaten track, but may be of interest to some following this thread: one program that has been a "slow burn" for me in this area is  Connected Text, a "personal wiki". That phrase alone will put some people off, and I know wiki-style editing is not for everyone. But it's a well-thought out piece of software. I've used it for some research on long-term writing projects, and it's been reliable, A good developer who fixes bugs quickly, and good forums.

Shades:
As far as I understood, the Zotero plugin stores anything it has downloaded for showing into the browser when a snapshot is made. When I looked for some specific page for a doctor here in Paraguay it didn't take too much time to collect all necessary files and put them on his laptop so his browser showed exactly the same data as mine.

No, Internet is definitely not everywhere available in this country...(lack of phone lines and cellular antennas) and that is mostly the terrain where this doctor has to use his specific skill (reconstructing bones so people are able to walk and/or use their hands again). This is an bad side effect that occurs when people that are too related have babies, but you have here small communities like that.

cmpm:
Yes I can see the intent of being able to to do what John wants with what you posted shades.

In fact one could load a ton of info on a hard drive and mail it, and the receiver would have quite a bit of info ready to go.

J-Mac:
How about mirroring the entire site and then picking out the page/pages you want?
-Cuffy (July 16, 2008, 11:20 AM)
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For me, that would be grabbing a whole lot extra that I don't want nor need just to get the one page that I do!

Thanks!

Jim

rjbull:
me, I'm only really familiar with Surfulater & Evernote:
the advantage of these programmes (I think) is that you can save part (or all) of a web page
-tomos (July 16, 2008, 04:27 PM)
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If I click the EverNote icon in Firefox, it pops up this message:

No text is selected. Do you want to add
an entire page to EverNote?

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EverNote seems surprised that I might want to capture a complete page.  Sometimes I do, of course, and then I generally use LWA.  Yet I think EverNote's implication is sensible.  Do I really want to keep the fluff as well as real content?  No, of course I don't.  In fact I mostly use EverNote at work, for capturing news items on work-related portals.  I only want the particular news article, not all the advertising or other uninteresting (to me) items.  Which makes me wonder, how many other people need compete capture all the time?

Another nice thing about EverNote is that it can output MHT files, so if I have to, I can send potted articles to other people, complete with images and clickable links.  I wish there were a universal standard for "compiled HTML" that Firefox and other browsers used, not just IE.

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