How to Read and Organize Online Articles (Without Driving Yourself Crazy) (2013)

That's the one that fascinates me - the Mozilla folks really shouldn't have the bigcorp "let's eat our seed corn today because nothing except this quarter matters" motive or even really a profit motive at all. It was a perfect opportunity to add a neat feature to their browser and maybe make a little money with high-quality promoted articles.

But no, it pretty much immediately turned into a pipeline to shovel the largest possible quantity of garbage into in pursuit of whatever pittance they make from it, and the only downside is that anyone who opens their flagship product is immediately overwhelmed with a page full of internet barrel-scrapings. Which, you know, couldn't possibly be bad for the product, could it?

Moreover, if you're using third-party tools, you now have two problems: managing and organising content AND managing those tools and keeping track of their sunsets and shutdowns.

(I've been bitten by that last twice, and still have un-migrated Readability articles. Made all the worse by the fact that Readability at some point employed its own URL-redirecting link-shortener ... which of course also went offline.)

Sadly, no full-featured Android apps.

This does, of course, strip all site styling. Images / artwork may be preserved, depending on how they are presented in the original HTML. (If using <img> tags, yes, if served through JS ... not so much.)

What's genius, though, is that multiple articles can be saved to a single document, which can be appended over time.

I use this to group items by similar topic, project, or interest, or to create a "BOTI" archive, where "BOTI" stands for "best of the interval". The idea here is to select the best items over a given period of time (week, month, year, etc., though I seem to be settling on six to twelve months), and organise those in a single place. You've Still Got to Read It[tm], but at least you've organised the material.

Reading this on an e-book reader, using the bookreader software, is also virtually always preferable to reading the same content online in a Web browser.

Evernote really helped during an intensive job search. I could clip the entire job listing to an article on Evernote, and I could refer to the full text later on. I could also add notes to it in any form! Nice!

At the time, I was also using Dropbox for cloud storage. I exited both Dropbox and Evernote eventually. Now I just use Google Workspaces for everything; no complaints.