Hi there,
I'm a long time CRIMPer, but mostly I'm lurking in the background here in the forum.

One thing I'm still looking for is the perfect program (for Windows) for storing large to huge amounts of web clippings or whole web pages for offline reading and storage (you never know when a web page will go offline, or a page will change substantially).

At the moment I'm using
a) the old Firefox plugin ScrapBook X from within the Firefox fork Pale Moon: it's robust (I have have some 1800 pages stored in one scrapbook and you don't notice any slowing down), you can sort the web pages into a hierarchical tree, edit, annotate and clean up the page; there is no tagging and searching is somewhat primitive; still the best when I want to save a perfect copy of a web page)

b) RightNote: the web clipper is quite good, format survives mostly (but not always) intact, tagging and searching is good, but editing is sometimes quirky; slows down with growing database

So I'm still looking for the perfect replacement of these two programs: Scrapbook X is obsolete (doesn't work with the new Firefox) although still working smoothly; with RightNote I'm not sure how much it can stomach in the long run.

Any suggestions?

Thanks a lot

Judith

Try EverNote and its web clipper.
Best
Wojciech

I use ScrapBook X too with Pale Moon (and I don't want to change it as long as this extension works for me - my main notes archive has about 3000 pages). You might try also the free, opensource Joplin Notebook which stores the data in markdown format and which has clients for windows, linux, macos, android. There is also a webextension for Firefox to capture pages (or selection of pages). The program is under active development. There are several solutions how to sync your notes between different devices.

https://github.com/laurent22/joplin

Another solution is Zotero, a bibliographic and notes manager, which is also free. The last version works with Firefox. The disadvantage of Zotero is that you can only capture full websites - not selections of text etc.

https://www.zotero.org/

I discovered Joplin just a few days ago and I'm still evaluating it. The clipping works quite fine (you have to some tidying up afterwards) but for more complex pages this may not be optimal and I miss folders and sub-folders.

Zotero I have on my disk but didn't use it for some time; must give it another try.

Cheers

jbaltsar wrote:

One thing I'm still looking for is the perfect program (for Windows) for storing large to huge amounts of web clippings or whole web pages for offline reading and storage (you never know when a web page will go offline, or a page will change substantially).

Hi,

It seems like a perfect fit for InfoQube:
1- It has a Universal Clipper (page sections or whole pages) which works on all browsers
2- Supports EmailToIQ to send content from mobile devices, or anytime IQ is not running
3- Storage is using a relational database engine, so performance if not affected by size

Pierre Paul Landry
InfoQube Designer
http://www.infoqube.biz

p.s. You know about the Wayback machine ? Very useful...
https://archive.org/web/

Would Neville Franks' Clibu work? https://www.clibu.com/

--Ken

Ditto on Evernote

It might sound like an extreme solution -- that's because it is -- but I've pretty much given up on Windows software for research organization and have turned to the Mac's DevonThink Pro. One click and everything I come across, from web clippings to electronic documents gets added to its database. ...There *might* be something as elegant, reliable and easy for Windows but I've not found it. Not RightNote, not OneNote, not EverNote, not any of the myriad browser add-ons. Nothing.

I was actually shocked by how it improved my work for such things. Not only does it automatically add web clippings (perfectly intact) to its database, it allows me to add all relevant documents that I create or come across electronically AND associate all of them together THEN it allows me to dump all manner of this disparate information that's relevant to appropriate Mac OR Windows (where I spend most of my time) software. It's kind of amazing. Everything just works and in a manner not possible in Windows alone.

It was a radical solution for me but it has been worth it.

I can't agree with you regarding Evernote. Here's why: Almost a year ago I discovered EN on my phone - which I use for most of my web saving - was no longer downloading full pages as it always used to do. I was just getting the link and a title. I had not changed any settings.So I asked EN if they could fix problem - they couldn't. And I was paying for premuum.

End of Evernote for me. I had used Pocket at one time so I tried it again. In terms of saving from the web it's even better than EN was before my problems with it on my phone. Pocket allows for tagging which I make good use of. No other product has consistently saved web pages as accurately as Pocjet does. As a result I will likely fet the oaid version.

Since I wasn't using EN fir clipping I wonderex if there a better solution for notes. There was, so now for notes or working out ideas virtually everything I do is with Dynalist. Now I nuch prefer working with Dynalist over EN for notetaking. Plus I now use it for tracking appointments and tasks. It is faster and more elegant than EN,

But back to the topic - Pocket is the best I have seen for saving web pages.

Daly

Jeffery Smith wrote:

Ditto on Evernote

Another possibility for Windows users is UltraRecall, which offers two advantages which some of the other solutions lack: (a) ability to edit the saved web clippings; (b) proper handling certain types of complex formatting (e.g. right to left text).

Another cool thing you can do in Ultra Recall is drag a URL from the address bar into the database but not actually store the page in the database. This is basically just a bookmark, but it still will be indexed and the page text is even highlighted in searches. Warning: I've found that the URL when clipping selected portions of a page to UR is no longer correct in the latest versions of Firefox. It still works correctly from Chrome and Vivaldi. Another benefit to UR is the clips can have custom metadata (properties or attributes) applied to them and thus allow for very fine-grained and geeky organization.

The InfoQube clipper is good. If you choose to save in MHT format, you can use the free BlockNote program to edit the clips. Similar to UR, since the clips are associated with IQ items, you get the properties and attributes here as well.

If capture fidelity is less important than getting the information into a more structured form, I actually like the ConnectedText and CrossLine methods of import, where headings are recreated from the captured material's HTML structure. CT can require quite a bit of clean-up, however, so it makes more sense for information you are really likely to use rather than good old kitchen sink hoarding. It's cool when you clip a long paper or essay to CT and have an automatically created table of contents, collapsible headings, etc.

4 categories:

1) Web page savers & archivers, part of but don't think it's the whole of what OP wants.

2) Clipboard apps, some are multimedia, several good ones, not exactly what's asked for.

3) Outliner apps with multimedia web elements, not exactly either.

4) Readers add-ons for browser, for offline, seems to be what is used for by OP, wanting a modern one with all the bells & whistles she knows is out there, as in links below.

Before that:

+ Might want to add Chrome browser use next to Firefox as many of us do, Chrome has become a beast and can't be ignored for future

+ Might want to get a good Dark reader add-on so can read longer in comfort without killing the eyes, "DARK Reader" add-on is on both chrome and Firefox

+ Might want to get a Chromebook, Chrome OS environment in effect also an Android tablet + long battery, slim, light, keyboard etc. Pixel is expensive, Samsung Pro slightly less, third best: Asus C302CA can be had used cheap(ish) on eBay. Has many uses, look at YouTube videos.

The off-line web READER plugins genre, take your pick, choose one that saves, as you stipulate, although Google cache (little arrow next to Google results) and archive.org have about half of dead web pages:

https://www.google.com/search?&q=firefox+addons+reader

https://www.google.com/search?&q=chrome+addons+reader

Might want to look at Google images for each reader too.

Daly de Gagne wrote:

I can't agree with you regarding Evernote. Here's why: Almost a year ago
I discovered EN on my phone - which I use for most of my web saving -
was no longer downloading full pages as it always used to do. I was just
getting the link and a title. I had not changed any settings.So I asked
EN if they could fix problem - they couldn't. And I was paying for
premuum.

Strange. I have no problems on my iPhone - all webpages are saved as usual.

You're fortunate. I have found no way to again get Evernote to down a complete page. I am using a Samsung And phone. What phone do you use?

Daly

Wojciech wrote:

Daly de Gagne wrote:
I can't agree with you regarding Evernote. Here's why: Almost a year ago
>I discovered EN on my phone - which I use for most of my web saving -
>was no longer downloading full pages as it always used to do. I was
just
>getting the link and a title. I had not changed any settings.So I asked
>EN if they could fix problem - they couldn't. And I was paying for
>premuum.

Strange. I have no problems on my iPhone - all webpages are saved as
usual.

Daly de Gagne wrote:

You're fortunate. I have found no way to again get Evernote to down a
complete page. I am using a Samsung And phone. What phone do you use?

Hi Daly,
I use iPhone SE with the newest IOS and save complete pages literally every day. Then I review them from time to time on my desktop computer. For me, it's very convenient and productive.
Best,
W.

I agree with Listerene's comment that DevonThink is particularly good at this. As is Evernote (surprisingly).

Two options that I've also found helpful and are a bit more cross-platform are: (1) web page simplification tools like Outline.com and Mercury Reader, and (2) the new generation of iOS-inspired clipping tools like Gladys.

If you're having trouble storing a particularly complex web page, pulling it through Outline.com first and then clipping it usually works in any tool that has web clipping functionality. As a bonus, this also gets around a lot of newspaper paywalls.

The new generation of iOS-inspired clipping tools let you capture multiple representations of a web page's content at the same time, behind the scenes. It looks like a single clipping, but it's captured a variety of representations. Then you can bring in whatever format works best for that particular page (RTF, WebArchive, raw HTML, etc.) into whatever archival tool you're using. You can use these as a kind of pre-processor for DevonThink, for example. Gladys shares its data on both iOS and MacOS, so you can clip something from your phone or iPad and figure out what do to with it later once you're back at your desktop.

--Chris

Anoter option is the excellent cross platform Notebooks app: https://www.notebooksapp.com

Chris Thompson wrote:

I agree with Listerene's comment that DevonThink is particularly good at this

Folks, perhaps get back to the original poster's request, where he said he was looking for Windows software...

---------------------------
jbaltsar wrote:

One thing I’m still looking for is the perfect program (for Windows) for storing large to huge amounts of web clippings

Pierre

p.s.
I'd like to make a recommendation when creating new threads:
Prefix the title with the relevant OSs (such as [Win], [Mac], [iOS], [Android], [All], etc).
It would help all of us better focus and better manage our precious time. Just my 2 cents

Would the Vivaldi browser's built-in notes feature be of any use to the OP?

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:

I'd like to make a recommendation when creating new threads:
Prefix the title with the relevant OSs (such as [Win], [Mac], [iOS],
[Android], [All], etc).
It would help all of us better focus and better manage our precious
time. Just my 2 cents

Or we could pay closer attention to the OP's question!

Hi there,
sorry for being silent for a few days, life is somewhat busy lately.

And thanks for all your replys, I will comment on some of them.

re: Clibu, Evernote Pocket etc
Call me oldfashioned, but somehow I don't like online or cloud solutions; these things come and go, they change their business plan or vanish althogether. I have half a ton of data in a program called InfoRapid which stopped being developed some 15 years ago. But it's still working and migrating the program to a new computer simply means copying the programs folder - I like this type of robust thing.

re: DevonThink and Mac
yeah, feels tempting sometimes, but will not happen anytime soon.

re: Joplin
I kind of like this program, it seems promising, but in some areas it is still somewhat limited; e.g. there doen't seem to be a way to mass import all my old notes, which would come as rtf or html files. And without a true tree structure to sort away masses of notes I can't say how useful Joplin will be in the long run

For the time being I will probably stick to a combination of ScrapBook X and RightNote: ScrapBook for quickly capturing web pages, RightNotes to archive those I want to keep (there is even an import option in RightNote for ScrapBook data!).

Thanks again

Judith

I don't know which Inforapid program you're using but their software is definitely still being updated: http://www.buildyourmap.de

jbaltsar wrote:

I have half a ton of data in a program called
InfoRapid which stopped being developed some 15 years ago. But it's
still working and migrating the program to a new computer simply means
copying the programs folder - I like this type of robust thing.

I still miss Scrapbook.
Apart from recommending IQ (e.g., in line with above comments from PPL), I would suggest you could also consider saving webpages as .mhtml files.
There would thus no longer be any need for Scrapbook or (say) Zotero's proprietary and similar access to those webpages - mhtml we pages should be able to be read by any half-decent file browser or html reader.
To some extent, IQ could make up for there being no folder/categorisation tool to match Scrapbook's, in a browser, but though IQ will be OK for saving web pages, it probably won't be able to do the simultaneous nested page AND linked .ZIp and other file content saving AND note/text-editing that Scrapbook does.

I would also mention WDS (Windows Desktop Search} and GDS {Google Desktop Search) in this context, as they can search the content of these mhtml files, so the files don't need to be kept in a proprietary database or database format. The disk thus becomes the database. There are some tools out there that work in a collaborative fashion with that database - one notable example is Folder Viewer from MatirSoft - , which I am currently trying to get my head around. It is not a toy. It incorporates/collaborates with the IE browser (as far as I understand it, at present) and various file viewers. It also collaborates with GDS, if that is detected on installation (I have it installed). GDS is arguably probably still the best desktop search tool on the planet, bar none. Folder Viewer does lots of other stuff as well. This seems to make it potentially a most promising data management and inspection tool. Not sure yet. Still trialling it (is $FREE).