The joys of web archiving

Posted by MadaboutDana
Aug 14, 2014 at 02:16 PM

Excellent, Hugh – thanks. You mention EagleFiler, which is an interesting but horribly flawed app with a totally useless search function (finds very little at all).

But your contention that one should stick with Finder, or store information at the folder/file level, is interesting. This is, of course, what Notebooks does. And in fact, despite my truly obsessive CRIMPing tendencies, this is also what I do myself: since discovering the astonishing FoxTrot Pro, I keep all of my key reference documents in simple Finder folders organised by client, creating a full-text index for each one as required.

FoxTrot Pro is far more powerful than the PC equivalent, Copernic Desktop (or the other PC competitors like X1). I have developed a huge respect for it. Now if it also allowed you to make spontaneous notes to accompany files, it would be, no doubt, the perfect solution (others would probably want to add tagging etc.). Of course you can do that anyway, using other software – there are so many lovely notetakers for the Mac, such as Ulysses, Moccanote, Metanota Pro, Write, etc., many of which can be instructed to keep notes in specific (Finder) folders.

Which means our working methods are not unalike. I use Curio/Scrivener (depending on my whim at any given moment) to create what you might call “projects”, often including source documents as well as draft translations, notes, reference docs such as PDFs, web pages and the like. But when I put together my resource archives, using final versions of the source and target documents, I always end up storing them in Finder, and not in Curio or Scrivener or any other all-in-one solution. In Finder, they can be accessed by anything – so if I need specific resources for a specific project, I can always pull them into Curio/Scrivener/Other Authoring Tool of your Choice, and if necessary, even leave them there.

It’s the sheer flexibility I love! And it’s tools like FoxTrot (or that elegant, super-cheap alternative EasyFind, ironically provided for free by the makers of DevonThink) – not to mention the improved, upcoming version of Spotlight – that help maintain this flexibility.

Cheers,
Bill