How do you archive articles and sites?

September 15, 2005 7:22 AM

How do you archive your bookmarked articles and sites for quick recall? I've always been incredibly impressed at the ability for some to post a link to an article they've read a year ago at a moment's notice. How do you find it so quicky?

Google? extensive Firefox bookmarks? Del.icio.us? What I've been doing lately is sending emails to my Gmail account and assigning tags in the body that I might connect the article. Is that the best system or are there tools out there of which I am unaware?

posted by any major dude to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

I use del.icio.us with lots and lots of tagging. I also tag the kind of articles I know I'll want to find five years later with 'resource' specifically to make those kind of searches easier. I think the key is to not use 'descriptive' tags (i.e. 'blog', 'news', etc.) but to think when tagging "What are the words I will use when I'm searching for this later?"
posted by bobot at 7:35 AM on September 15, 2005

del.icio.us. Yes, good tagging helps. A lot of people tag random stuff with "web" presumably because it's on the web. But almost everything in del.icio.us is on the web! (No, this stuff has nothing to do with web design).
posted by grouse at 7:40 AM on September 15, 2005

I was thinking about this when a parallel question came up a couple of days ago. I do love del.icio.us but I'm also beginning to question both my own tagging logic (kind of) and the necessity of keeping everything, now that I'm getting above 500 links.

I daresay there's no easy answer to this question. But I'm starting to think that bookmarking should not always be the primary focus. Some things are just as easy (or easier, considering that annoying load time --- yeah, it's only minor, but it's there all the time) to retrieve through google. But I haven't quite worked out just how to delineate. It's a work in progress. Perhaps having a couple of del.icio.us accounts and/or email storage could help. I'll be interested to see how others approach it.
posted by peacay at 8:08 AM on September 15, 2005

If you know where you saw it, a site: search on Google can narrow things down.
posted by Leon at 8:21 AM on September 15, 2005

Furl. Tags + excerpts + categories + saving a "local" copy so you'll still have it if the original changes or is moved + a search function. Between all that you're likely to find something even if you tagged it in a less-than-sensible way. And you can mark read vs unread. I know delicious has its hipster cred and all but I don't actually find it very useful for all the hype it gets. If you actually use your bookmarks for research (as I do) delicious is pointless, IMO.
posted by poweredbybeard at 9:05 AM on September 15, 2005

Response by poster: Google's next project should be for people to create their own personal google with their own personal tags. Anyone on Google Labs reading this?
posted by any major dude at 9:05 AM on September 15, 2005

Google should buy del.icio.us and expand it. Awesome.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:40 AM on September 15, 2005

del.icio.us and Google + a good memory. All you need to remember is one rare phrase and Google will turn the article right up.
posted by callmejay at 9:55 AM on September 15, 2005

Sites come and go. I like to keep local copies of important things, which get organized by folder and are indexed by the desktop search engine as a bonus (google desktop at home, MSN desktop at work - both work equally well although I prefer the MSN product slightly).

To save the content, I do one of two things:
- Short snippets: copy/paste into OneNote
- Entire articles: save as a single compressed .chm file from IE, or print to PDF driver.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 11:32 AM on September 15, 2005

The recalls each article as quickly as the quickest individual. Since the quickest individual is different for every article asking the group is a serious optimization. So, nothing against the techniques described, but you are never going to parallel the speed of metafilter across a broad spectrum of subjects.
posted by Chuckles at 12:08 PM on September 15, 2005

The group recalls...
posted by Chuckles at 12:09 PM on September 15, 2005

Some programs, like Zoot (plain text) and Evernote (rich text plus images), automatically collect URLs when text is clipped and saved into it. That helps with later need for attribution.
posted by megatherium at 2:40 PM on September 15, 2005

Before Delicious, I used to try to commit everything to memory just in case I needed to find it later, thinking I couldn't possibly forget. I always did. Delicious, please marry me.
posted by Juliet Banana at 7:34 AM on September 16, 2005