Hi all! Is a web clipper feature something on the roadmap so that articles saved can be accessed within the Memex dashboard instead of having to be redirected to the original source? What I have in mind is what Evernote’s web clipper does but being able to use Memex to do it instead.
Let me know if I can provide any additional information.
Thanks!
Jonathan
I think the extension SingleFile is worth to check out. It can really save a faithful copy of an entire web page in a single HTML file.
I doubt this would be built into the application. This isn’t a trivial option, and it could be (and is, elsewhere) an ambitious project all by itself. The developers could probably build something which would be “good enough” for most, but I imagine it’s something which would generate a lot of support requests all by itself. There are other tools you can use this for.
Personally, I prefer that my annotations and links are tied to the actual page. I feel the original context is important and there’s a lot of subtle things which get lost when you annotate a local copy of the page.
If you’re worried about the page going offline in the future, then you could save it to archive.org with a browser extension.
I use SingleFile, too, but I believe Memex users could still benefit from a web clipper, especially when full text search doesn’t work well enough in some cases, e.g. Better support for Chinese/Korean/Japanese Characters. I’m a new Memex user, so I won’t pretend I understand how Memex full text search works 
but with all the years of experience with web clippers, server-side archives/snapshots, I deeply believe that a decent browser-side web clipper is the solution; often times even a browser-based web clipper doesn’t cope well with “sneaky” web pages that do many tricks using JavaScript and/or CSS.
Server-side archives are nice to have, but they don’t necessarily equal to what the user see, for many reasons. Not to mention they can change over time and the only way to ensure changes are captured is to monitor them.
On the other hand, SingleFile works well enough, but usually it’s a bit intrusive and attention-demanding.
I would also like this feature.
This feature (web clipper) the major reason I’ve resurrected my Evernote subscription. To someone who has lived long enough with the Internet, it’s quite obvious that any free service can fail you; who’s to guarantee archive.org will be free and, most importantly, available forever?
That said, this requested feature could start humble, for instance, just clip the texts, and gradually improves, maybe via open source collaboration, sponsorships, etc… Needless to say it will impose a hard requirement on storage and sync-ing, but it seems Memex is already heading to a paid service direction…
Um… maybe… sponsorship? I’d gladly chip in some. Doesn’t have to be a full-fledged clipper at the beginning. I’m not used to jumping to the original article when I’m reviewing in Memex; some context ready at hand would be great. Ofc anyone like going to the original place should still be allowed to do that.
Hey folks!
We do actually store the full html of pages locally but have not done anything with it yet. Once we have an API, you could build your own reader from that data.
On our end we’re not planning to make it a full blown clipper like in Evernote et al.
It’s a big feature to get right. Getting a prototype of it is easy though there are so many ways the parsers for these things fail that its its own project. Not planning to do it anytime soon.
Many thanks for the pointer! Found the pages stored in the Indexed DB memexPersistent. Good to know they are available somewhere.