Scrapbook

From Admin-SIG

From the [Scrapbook website (http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/)]

ScrapBook is a Firefox extension, which helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections. 
Key features are lightness,  speed, accuracy and multi-language support. Major features are:
   * Save Web page
   * Save snippet of Web page
   * Save linked Web page
   * Organize the collection in the same way as Bookmarks tree
   * Full text search and quick filtering search of the collection
   * Simple Editing of the collected Web page
   * Text/HTML edit feature resembling Opera's Notes

I find Scrapbook to be hugely usefull. It is changing the way I use the web more than any feature except tabbed browsing has changed my web use. I have not explored all its features, yet, but what I have used works intuitively, and gracefully.

Saving

There are several reasons I have wanted to save web pages. The biggest reason is because I'm afraid I'll never find it again. Even if you bookmark, pages move or disappear. So I used to try and use the browser's "Save Page As ..." feature. It never worked very well, though. If the page used frames or some such thing, what you managed to save just wasn't what you had wanted to save. With Scrapbook I have not had that problem. It saves the entire page effectively, and it also allows you to save just portions of the page. One use for that that I wouldn't have predicted, is when I want to print a page that doesn't provide a print friendly formatted version. I just save the text with Scrapbook, then print. I find I do this with blogs quite often.

Searching

Before Scrapbook, I would save pages in a directory and then if I wanted to search I'd use find or grep. That works OK, but switching between viewing the saved pages in a browser and searching them in an terminal was a bit of a pain. Being able to use the Scrapbook interface to manage and search the saved pages is convienent.

Annotating

With all the digital technology at my disposal, I still found myself often printing web pages. Sometimes its just because I want to read them on the bus or something, and I still do that. But the other big reason is that I wanted to take print the page, then use a highlighter on it, and make notes on it. You can do that to the pages you save with Scrapbook, again in the Scrapbook interface. It has a highlighter feature, and you can make notes that are merged right into the HTML page. It's awesome. I have wanted that functionality forever, and although this is not the first application to provide it, the fact that it does so in the context of a tool I use all the time, Firefox, really drives up its value to me.