Hi all,
I’m starting to use Obsidian after years of having my data hostage to Evernote and Notion. One thing that I’m trying to do with Obsidian besides my PKM is to preserve content against Link Rot. I have a bunch of bookmarks saved in Notion, some 10+ years old, collected through years of professional activity that were awesome sources, for which I have several notes and now no reference to link to.
What I’m doing is using MarkDownload to fetch the page contents and store them in a “References” folder, where I can read, process and make notes on the content, without fear of losing it in the future. I tried bookmarking tools like LinkAce and Linkding, which saves the page to Web Archive, but I dislike this feature and I cannot annotate their content. I like Wallabag very much, and I can host it, but the one problem I find with it is that Wallabag won’t preserve images, just fetch them from the original site. If the site is gone, so is the picture.
So my question is, what is the method you people are using? Do you use a bookmarking tool and just hope for the content to be there forever? Do you save it in Wallabag or another tool? Do you also have an implemented workflow to save web articles that you can share with me?
Also, if you can share how you bookmark and control useful online tools, I would appreciate it.
3 Likes
If there is web content I want to be part of a note, then I would use Markdownload and add that content to a note.
For actual archiving – where I want to preserve the actual page layout, images, etc. – I use SingleFile to create a single page HTML version of the page and store that in an attachments folder and link to it.
1 Like
Not that different from my method. I don’t really care about the page layout, only the content is saved, and MarkDownload is very good at that, getting everything already in Obsidian markdown, including images.
I configured MarkDownload to save the images to a subfolder with the same name as my attachments folder in Obsidian and attach my frontmatter to the file, so all I have to do after saving the page is to copy it to the Obsidian vault.
Do you do any annotations on the pages you save? How do you do it, if so? Do you just create new notes linked to the article? I’m using footnotes, but I’m not very happy with the results, something like a comment feature from Word or Adobe Acrobat would be ideal, but I haven’t figured out how to do something like that yet.
You can use Zotero, when you store a webpage in zotero, itstore a snapshot to that cite.
I’m using zotero for bookmarking. If you don’t trust in the snapshop funcionality, you can print the page as a pdf and store in obsidian.
i did’t like MarkDownload, as it only store plain text.
1 Like
I use Zotero for PDF annotations, but not much beyond that. Storing content in plain text is the very reason I moved to Obsidian, and why I tried Dokuwiki for a few months before it, so MarkDownload is the ideal tool for me. The fact that it can also download media from the page is a plus.
I’m also curious about how people manage bookmarks, like maps, online tools etc. Is everyone using external tools, or just a big note with all your important links, maybe divided into categories?
I use Zotero for that purpose as well.
Otherwise, Pocket and Instapaper are also useful readlater apps with decent Obsidian integrations (especially Pocket) and the ability to preserve content.
Except for quotation, I keep my Obsidian mostly free of third-party content. Referenced literature, or any digital assets (as maps, etc.) for that matter are in their respective library in Zotero, OneDrive, Photos, Eagle etc.
1 Like
I also use SingleFile to archive a page. Then i use this plugin to display the html file in Obsidian.
1 Like
My preferred method for annotations like this is to write them in a separate note, next to embedded block references of the original content.
If the web content source is already saved in a note, open a new note. Type ![[, then select the source note title. With that link in place, go back inside the brackets and type ^ at the end of the linked note’s name. From there, you can fuzzy find and autocomplete the block the embed. At that point, all you need to do is write your annotations next to the embed.
Here is a visual guide: Obsidian Block References — Now in the Obsidian App! - YouTube
1 Like