Just thoughts …

Tag: Evernote

  • Bookmarking & browsers

    At the meeting yesterday someone, I believe it could have been John, asked how you could move bookmarks from one browser to another. It’s a good question, and I’ll try and answer it below, but perhaps an alternative answer is even better and that’s what this post will also address. But first, exporting and importing bookmarks for the common browsers.

    However Microsoft has been changing it’s browsers quite a bit over the past couple of years. Internet Explorer was phased out for a bespoke re-write which was called Edge; this in turn was then completely re-engineered to use the same Chromium platform as Google Chrome, Brave and others, which was called NEW Edge. Confusing eh!?

    Internet Explorer – read this article [Internet Explorer 11 was the default browser for Windows 10, but you may find that it’s been replaced in one of its automatic upgrades by Edge]. For all older versions of Internet Explorer including ones for versions of Windows older than Windows 10 – you might like to look at this article.

    Edge – if you’ve got the NEW Edge browser rather than the old legacy EDGE version (which should still be on your machine, as should Internet Explorer 11, if you’re running Windows 10) – this is probably the easiest way of exporting your bookmarks/favourites from a Microsoft browser. Alternatively you should look to see how you can run Internet Explorer if you’ve got the OLD Edge installed on Windows 10. Then you could use the notes above for Exporting from Internet Explorer. Alternatively upgrade either of them to NEW Edge and use the first link in this paragraph to export your Favourites. Simples!

    Note: Exported Microsoft Favourites (Bookmarks) are stored as .htm (HTML) files.

    If you’re using Brave this article explains how you can Import and Export Bookmarks.

    There must be a better way, and there is! You could use a third-party application such as Evernote, which can not only store Bookmarks, but also whole articles through the installation of a Browser Extension which allows you to “clip” content to a “note” in your Evernote datastore held in the cloud. Evernote has long been a favourite piece of software of mine and I pay an annual subscription to get an extended service from it, but there is a really good free version which you can use to trial it and see if you like it. The screen shot shows that you can save the whole article, or just part of it. [One great feature is that it only saves the article, not the additional content, sidebars, panels, etc which often hold ads.]

    Alternatively, you could use a Bookmark Manager such as diigo. Again this sits as an extension in your Browser and every time you want to save the link to a website, you click on the diigo extension, and perhaps add some tags to help you find the site at a later date …

    … and after pressing Save Bookmark, it saves the page with a brief excerpt …

    Finally there’s Pocket which combines bookmarking with a facility for offline reading of webpages. This used to be a great feature when trains didn’t have good WiFi and you could catch-up on your reading, but it’s still a very useful way of storing web content for reading away from the Internet and it’s the way I store all articles that I come across that I’m going to use in Computer Group meetings. Again, you can install a browser extension for all the major browsers that makes it very easy just to click on a webpage and it’s immediately saved and synchronised to any device that has Pocket running on it.

    Looking at the bar in the browser above (Brave) you can see icons for LastPass, Pocket, Feedly, diigo, Evernote, AdBlock Plus, GoFullPage (full page screen shot), Push to Kindle, and Flipboard plus the extension to open the Extensions Library. Of course the screen shots for an Android or iOS device would be different; these are just taken from a browser running on a desktop or laptop.

    Extensions are really neat, BUT only install ones from the Extensions Library of your Browser. Generally Chrome Extensions will work in Brave. That’s probably a topic for another post at some later date.

  • Just supposin’ … [Part 2]

    Just supposin’ … [Part 2]

    Reaction to my previous post from an old colleague and friend Brian Kelly and the lack of response to my enquiry about using diaspora* and any of the Indieweb offerings has led me to put those ideas to sleep. However, having set the hare running, I need to close the issue with a short description of what cloud-based services I do use, and offer a justification of why – remembering that continuity and reliability are of huge importance to the individual who has no access to corporate systems.

    Unlike Google, I recognise the value of RSS feeds so Feedly has become a really important part of my personal IT infrastructure. Being able to track the posts on a number of blogs and/or websites that I have chosen to follow places it for me above other services such as Flipboard, which I do use to create magazines of content I want to archive, but not as an RSS aggregator at which it is rather poor. Having farmed my RSS feeds, what do I do with them – well I tend to save them in Pocket which I can then access offline as well. [I should mention that it is essential for me to also have services that have an iOS app (for the iPhone/iPad) as well as being able to be accessible from a web browser.]

    I think with these two I have chosen niche applications that have no stronger competitors and therefore I have a reasonable expectation that they will be around for a long time.

    The same is the case with my next piece of “kit”. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t realise the significance of this until rather late on. I’m talking about Evernote.  It’s difficult to find a thing that Evernote cannot do. It’s not only a note taker, but it can hold clipped webpages, store video and audio clips and even do a reasonable job as a word-processor! If you don’t use it – give it a look. I just love the way you can share a note or a notebook with someone else. Such a convenient way of sharing ideas.

    Of course I could use the services offered by Apple as all my kit is provided by them, but I’m not yet convinced by iCloud. Let me give you an example. One of my most-hated pieces of software is iTunes because of the limitations of its data base. Despite that I use it a lot – perhaps I shouldn’t, but I have invested a lot of time and effort in getting it to work for me and now it does, on multiple devices including my Apple TV, using an ingenious workaround that involves storing my iTunes Library in my Dropbox folder and the media on a separate external hard disk. Why don’t I use my iCloud Drive? Well I can’t get it to work on that drive because … would you believe it … iTunes can see my Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive folders but NOT my iCloud Drive!!!

    In any case it makes sense to use multiple cloud storage services so I make use of all the main ones with subscriptions to Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud.

    That just leaves collaboration and social media services. Until very recently I was convinced that Google had the service offering that was best for me. It provided the granularity, security and functionality that I wanted. It integrated with my main interest – photography – exceptionally well, and even provided a photo storage and editing facility that was as good as any other around. I’ve previously blogged about my discontent at the demise of Picassa, and the confusion of Google+ Photos and Google Photos. Well the latter is beginning to emerge as a nice piece of software but what has happened to Google+ is just not acceptable.  How can you expect a piece of software to develop when you take away functionality. It doesn’t make sense to me. So I’m now looking more seriously at returning to using Facebook more, after all I now know how to share Google Photo Albums on Facebook.

    So that’s about it … my personal cloud-based infrastructure. If I’ve forgotten anything, or I change my mind, I’ll update this post at a later date. Bye for now :-).

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