HACKER Q&A
📣 krishadi

Recording a Browsing Session?


Is there a good way to store and access browsing sessions?

When I search the internet for something, I usually never find one good answer, but bits and pieces of it in multiple webpages. I sometimes use a bookmark to mark the pages, and sometimes use a web-clipper. But I'd like to have something that does both and let me record my thoughts/comments along with it.

How do you go about this? Is there a method or a workflow you follow? Or a tool that helps you?


  👤 MaknMoreGtnLess Accepted Answer ✓
Unless it's a well defined technical solution or a very deep and narrow (well defined) topic, I've always found "the answer" to be spread across multiple webpages/sites/sources. To tackle this:

1. I have a coarse hierarchy of topic names as a directory tree

2. These directories have mostly text files in them but can also have PDF etc

3. Text files contain my summary/"the answer" followed by the relevant extract from webpage (citation). There usually are multiple such citations

4. Since I mainly deal with a lot of textual context, I have mostly text files but there are situations where I need spreadsheets/pictures/video - in those cases, I save the webpages as PDF but maintain a parallel version of #3 with notes to refer to the native format when spreadsheets/pictures/video need to be involved