Pinboard I use for pointers to things - GitHub projects that might come in handy in the future, development/design resources, particularly interesting Wikipedia articles, and other things like interviews and magazine articles.
But there's some stuff that I want to keep. I used to have a `~/box` folder on my Mac where I'd keep pictures, quotes, and screenshots of web pages I really liked. I wanted to keep them locally so that I would always have a copy of them. However, there were problems with this. By just keeping pictures as files, I couldn't always easily find where the picture came from (not without coming up with a complicated naming scheme or moving away from the simplicity of just having files in a folder). I kept quotes in plain text, so attribution was difficult for them, too — I needed to be able to capture quotes quickly, so I didn't have time to also store the URL the quote came from. And screenshots of webpages aren't exactly interactive — if I wanted to look at some HTML to see how something was done on the page, too bad. I also didn't have a pretty way to look at all the things I'd wanted to keep. All I had was a Finder window.
I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page. Besides, if I archive the whole page, how can I indicate which image/quote I wanted to save in the first place? Long story short, Pinboard's archiving isn't quite what I want (though, like I said, I've been thinking about switching it on for backing up interviews).
Gimme Bar is basically the best of all those worlds. I can save images, videos, quotes, and site designs. I can easily see where the image/quote/etc. came from. The site gives me a purdy way of looking at them. And integration with Dropbox means I always have a local copy of everything. Gimme Bar lets me have my cake, eat it, and have my cake stored in Dropbox (I may be stretching this metaphor).
> I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page.
Hard drive space is cheap, cheaper than your own time when you discover you want context or perhaps some other choice sentence from that page. The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.
(My own current solution-hack is two parallel systems: manual Evernotes for specific quotes or photos, and an automatic archive system that downloads the entire page: http://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs So I consult one or the other as appropriate.)
> The best solution is to save the whole page, and annotate the bit of interest.
Agreed. That's definitely something I'd love to see Gimme Bar do: in addition to showing me the quote I pulled out of the page, also give me the option to see the full page, with the text I quoted highlighted.
FYI, if you want to recover the origin of those ~/box pictures, they may have the original URL and referring URL stored in their metadata. Anything saved from a web browser should have this information in it.
You can use "mdls" to see it. I put a quick and dirty python library to get and set these values at: https://gist.github.com/2889617 (I use it to backup this data.)
This field can also help you find the source of those random pdf files lying around your disk. And you can query it with spotlight. For example,
Pinboard I use for pointers to things - GitHub projects that might come in handy in the future, development/design resources, particularly interesting Wikipedia articles, and other things like interviews and magazine articles.
But there's some stuff that I want to keep. I used to have a `~/box` folder on my Mac where I'd keep pictures, quotes, and screenshots of web pages I really liked. I wanted to keep them locally so that I would always have a copy of them. However, there were problems with this. By just keeping pictures as files, I couldn't always easily find where the picture came from (not without coming up with a complicated naming scheme or moving away from the simplicity of just having files in a folder). I kept quotes in plain text, so attribution was difficult for them, too — I needed to be able to capture quotes quickly, so I didn't have time to also store the URL the quote came from. And screenshots of webpages aren't exactly interactive — if I wanted to look at some HTML to see how something was done on the page, too bad. I also didn't have a pretty way to look at all the things I'd wanted to keep. All I had was a Finder window.
I know that Pinboard's premium service can archive each bookmark I send there (I've been thinking about enabling it just so I have permanent copies of interviews), but archiving an entire page is overkill for when I just want to save one image or one choice sentence from the page. Besides, if I archive the whole page, how can I indicate which image/quote I wanted to save in the first place? Long story short, Pinboard's archiving isn't quite what I want (though, like I said, I've been thinking about switching it on for backing up interviews).
Gimme Bar is basically the best of all those worlds. I can save images, videos, quotes, and site designs. I can easily see where the image/quote/etc. came from. The site gives me a purdy way of looking at them. And integration with Dropbox means I always have a local copy of everything. Gimme Bar lets me have my cake, eat it, and have my cake stored in Dropbox (I may be stretching this metaphor).
Anyway, I really, really like Gimme Bar.