(Archived) Web Clipper Suggestion

[drulupis 0]

I like to keep my web clippings tidy. It makes sense that without all the superfluous ads and links that most web articles include, it has to speed up indexing and searching, there's less content to sync, and it also keeps the local database size smaller.

I clip my web pages to a temporary "[sorting]" notebook.

During down time, or when I revisit the clipped notes, I tidy these clippings by editing the notes and removing the ads and superfluous links. I then add tags before moving the note into the required notebook.

One really useful web tool is http://www.printwhatyoulike.com

It allows you to dynamically remove unwanted content from a web site before printing it or saving it.

The content is only removed from the display however, and still exists in the background.

Clip the reformatted page into Evernote however and you'll find the clipped document has returned to it's preformatted version.

A workaround is to save the modified format to a html page and clip that, however you'll have to manually update the url link in the clipped note.

Another option is to save the modified document to a pdf and add this to Evernote. The downside with this approach however is that the pdf note size consumes more disk space than the html content itself.

It would be nice to have similar re-formatting options available within the Evernote web clipper itself.

It also means Evernote would be storing less data on their servers ;-)

Just a thought..

[crane 40]

It sounds like you clip a whole web page and then remove the parts you don't want. How about flipping that around and just clip the bits of the web page that you do want? For instance, if I'm clipping from, say, a blog, I'll clip the content of the post, including any images and the title, and put that into EN.

I do find that some sites make this difficult; amazon.com comes to mind, but it's still easier to clip a bit instead of everything.

[drulupis 0]

It sounds like you clip a whole web page and then remove the parts you don't want. How about flipping that around and just clip the bits of the web page that you do want? For instance, if I'm clipping from, say, a blog, I'll clip the content of the post, including any images and the title, and put that into EN.

I do find that some sites make this difficult; amazon.com comes to mind, but it's still easier to clip a bit instead of everything.

I agree, and whilst this works for some sites, there are a lot of sites that have non-required content interspersed with the required content.

To skip the ads,etc would require clipping into two or more notes and then merging them back, or including some of the non-required content in the clip and then later removing that.

[MikePearsonNZ 0]

Agree. Evernote should support a multiple entry clipboard, similar to ClipMarks, Amplify, WebNotes and other comparable services. These allow me to only select relevant disjoint paragraphs on a page, often in a different order to their page layout, and then associate them with the original source URL.

[Robert in SF 1]

I have found that currently the bookmarklet for www.printwhatyoulike.com works great for editing a webpage of superflous items/entries, to make a clean page perfect for clipping.

It provides a sidebar to help you undo "deletions" and save the page as a PDF (through another webservice).

I hover the mouse over the main article and finagle the red selection box over the article, and I find that sometimes hovering over the whitespace near the article headline selects the complete article body very well. You can always select any extraneous sections and delete those when need very quickly.

Then you can close the sidebar once you have captured/formatted the page to your preference, and then clip it with the Evernote clipper.

I mostly use Chrome now as my browser, and the web clips go to the server Evernote first and then sync around to the clients. They all look the same as the page optimized to my liking. I don't have the problem of clipping the unmodified page as was described earlier in this thread.

Try it and see how you like it now!