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Comment by boredgamer2 | Hacker News Reader

Very cool. This seems like such a "Duh. Users want this" feature. I wish it was integrated in Firefox years ago. I bookmark some sites and then come back years later, but perhaps they hijacked the URL or they later changed the URL's parameters.

And then when I return, I get a 404. Instead of bookmarking, I'd love to "capture" the current info, divs, and graphics.

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You could do that with the Firefox extension "SinleFile" [1]. It main purpose is to save a full webpage as one single html file with images etc encoded in the html file (no more messy html file + folder cluttering), very neat. There is also a variant that is a html/zip hybrid called SingleFileZ [2] that gets smaller saved file.

In the settings you could set so that sites you bookmark is saved and also link the bookmark to the saved file locally if you want to.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/singlefilez/

That looks great! Firefox should have something like SingleFile built-in. Instead of just copying features from Chrome, they should lead the innovation and add useful features like this.

I used this in like IE5 (I think) with MHTML. Though after looking a little, looks like SingleFile is more featureful (gets lazy loaded stuff etc)

I've been using SingleFile for a couple of months now, to auto-save every page I visit, and it works well. It's exactly as simple as it needs to be. My only real complaints are that it can be slow on large pages and that it pollutes your download history (every auto-save shows up as a download), both of which I suspect are due to limitations in the extension API.

While it's far from an ideal solution, you can throw your bookmarks periodically to archive.org's "Save Page Now!" service. It's easy to semi-automate it - here's how I use it with pinboard.in bookmark exports: https://pastebin.com/uUVE22RD

This solution is on the user side, which is great because each person can get and manage saved pages for themselves.

But if we're looking for a developer side solution, then making pages that last an order of magnitude longer may be better for everyone in the long run, e.g. https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

archive.fo is also very good to use.

Joplin is a local thing you can run for this. Basically, saving a snapshot of a page. Has browser extensions.

https://joplinapp.org/

I like the ability to use tags too -- I've got various product/tech ideas and it's nice collecting information with it and not having to worry about the pages going away or changing.

+1 for the Joplin web clipper. I really like using Joplin for notes, especially the command line version.

Not a firefox extension, but I moved to using Polar Bookshelf[0] for exactly this reason.

[0] https://getpolarized.io/

I have been searching for a tool exactly like this. Thank you for sharing!

There's an option for this ("Misc. > save the page of a newly created bookmark") in SingleFile [1].

[1] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile/

Pinboard [0] has this feature with additional price. Just bookmark and you are done. Later you can text search in their content.

[0] https://www.pinboard.in/

Does it capture your view of the page, though (i.e. use your own browser, with its cookie jar, to do the scrape)? I'd like to, for example, snapshot my Facebook feed.

Tnen check out historysearch [0] If I remember correctly they index your history so it could include your history. You don't even need to bookmark.

Of course I cannot vouch for their respect for privacy.

[0] https://historysearch.com/

I made an application[0] that does capture your view. It's screenshot-based. It works outside of a browser too - anything on your screen. All local too, so no privacy concerns :)

[0] https://apse.io

Interesting. How do you/does Apse make $

The website shows a 'buy' button, and the pricing model.

I see that now, thank you!

No it does not. That means it also doesnt work for any news sites that you have subscriptions to. Im using the joplin web clipper pretty heavily for this purpose.

Afraid of lose the contents on the page, I used to save it as PDF on cloud. Far from ideal but happened way too much I go back to the page and get a 404 page error or so.

If enough people did this, it would provide more pressure for websites not to just nuke their old URL schemes every time they switch from wordpress to Drupal...

I would love an automated solution for this that is also smart enough to use my logins to access subscription based news sites for archival purposes.

A smart crawler.

you can do this, sort of.

web developer menu

toggle tools

select ...

select settings

turn on "take a screenshot of the entire page"

now you get a camera icon. clicking it snapshots the current webpage (as a veeery tall image)

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