Firefox ScrapBook extension
I’ve been waiting for something like the ScrapBook Firefox extension ever since I started using a Web browser. ScrapBook enables you to save a snapshot of any Web page, or selection of a Web page, as easily as you would bookmark it, and then allows you to highlight passages, and provide your own annotations.
With an agile and intuitive interface, ScrapBook is yet another astonishing testimony to the superiority of Firefox as a Web browsing platform. For the first time in my life, I’m willing to put aside my nostaglic attachment to dead-tree books to consider how great it would be if everything I wanted to read were online.
The only problem I see is: What if I want to share my ScrapBook online? Or don’t want it to be restricted to one local machine? Is there any way I could synchronize it with a remote server?
Some time ago, driven by the same need to annotate Web pages that ScrapBook seeks to address, I experimented with a Zope-based annotation server project, and the annotation features of the W3C’s experimental multipurpose Web client, Amaya. But the way the annotation server worked is that it would save the "coordinates" of your annotations for a particular page in a database (local or on a trusted server), while referencing the original URL of the document. The problem was that many of the items that I wanted to annotate were items from semi-free publications like the New York Times or the Economist, where I could never be sure for how long I would have access to the original document.
Additionally, if these publications were to change their site design, the "coordinates" of my annotations could easily be lost.
I toyed with the idea of writing some sort of product to accompany the annotation server that would make a snapshot of the page so that perpetual access would be ensured.
But currently I live a somewhat less-than-wired existence, carrying my laptop from place to place in Argentina, where my access to the Internet in general, let alone broadband coverage, is somewhat limited. For working with my collected documents, it’s ideal to have them available offline.
So for now, ScrapBook fits the bill far better than an annotation server does.
But it seems that there’s an opportunity here for extending this excellent product.