Best way to save web articles/pages for future reference?

Question

I'm trying to manage a personal knowledge base using a personal wiki (currently using MoinMoin, before that MediaWiki). Apart from organizing e-books and papers, I would like to be able to save web pages for future reference in my personal wiki. I've researched a little bit, and I found a couple of browser add-ons for more advanced saving of a web page. As an alternative, I knew that a PDF printer driver can be useful as well - print a page instead to a real printer to the PDF driver).

The PDF driver works well, a couple of pages that I used for test look OK, and I plan to upload these web-articles-converted-PDFs in my personal wiki.

Did I miss some other alternative for converting? What do you use in this general problem of keeping web page/articles for future reference?

EDIT: I forgot to mention the requirement for the above to be cross-platform - to be able to save, upload, read and update my article database from Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X computers.

Answer 1

I use delicious.com, a social bookmarking service, I couldn't live without. Tagging is great for categorizing and grouping things, just like on StackOverflow.

If you want to store the content of your links, you could try Evernote. It works on many platforms (Web, Windows, Mac, iPhone, Windows Mobile). There is a free and a premium version.

Answer 2

I use delicious too, but the really good articles I print out and put them in a dedicated folder.

I also use Google Notebook quite often, but more for private stuff.

Answer 3

I use Thumbtack. It is not an offline solution but I think it worths

http://livelabs.com/thumbtack/

Answer 4

My approach is approximately similar to yours - custom personal wiki (I use DokuWiki), put things there (PDF is good format, though often I save just links), take backups. I simply wouldn't trust any third-party service to solely host my important stuff.

Answer 5

It probably doesn't work for everything, but I have been really impressed with the simplicity of Microsoft's "OneNote" product. You can cut and paste text into virtual "notebooks", can also store links and best of all, very easily via a keyboard shortcut, grab a portion of the screen and have it cut/pasted directly pasted into One Note. I find it very helpful to be able to quickly cut/paste just a key-snippet of an article of interest and have it thrown into a default 'notebook' for me to organize later.

You could easily creat a page with links, organized by whatever criteria you want, and then not only paste the link in, but also annotate why you are saving the link (i.e. 'this is the article that explains hierarchicalids in sql server 2008'.) So you don't just have a link, you have a searchable note to remind yourself why you saved it in the first place.

Another neat feature is the ability to do a search for text inside images (i.e. from screens you saved) using OCR I assume.

You can password protect certain pages if you want, so I have begun keeping some sensitive info in their as well (logons and passwords, account numbers etc). I am sure it is not massively secure, but its secure enough for me.

Answer 6

Evernote hasn't been mentioned yet. If you want, you can use this to save entire web pages, or just save the bits that are relevant.

Evernote's strength lies in its ability to save literally anything (web clips, photos, texts...) in a common and searchable repository. You can access this repository through a web frontend or natively in Windows + Mac + iPhone.

Answer 7

Try ZOTERO the Firefox plugin.

Answer 8

Dokuwiki and the MakeLink Firefox Extension: Configure it for Dokuwiki url posting syntax

Answer 9

TiddlyWiki. It's local, portable, extensible, cross platform and it duplicates easy. I try to avoid using pdf printing on most of the good stuff and will often use wget to grab the html and all it's links (if the content is the type of thing that copy and paste just won't handle).