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Comment by massysett | Hacker News Reader

I realized I was overusing bookmarks. I now save webpages (perhaps as PDF) if it contains information I want to refer to later, such as an insightful article, technical information, a humorous bit, or the like.

Bookmarks are good only for links to things for which only the most current version is worth accessing. That’s my banking websites, a shopping site, my employer’s remote desktop system, etc.

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There's also https://archivebox.io which can take your bookmarks and archive them in many ways. Unfortunately back when I tried it last time it was a big buggy, I wish there was a better solution to build a nice archive of the sites I visit more often just in case.

I found the Chrome it uses for fetching needs a kick every couple of days. That definitely improved my experience.

On that same vein, shoutout to Epub Press[0]: a browser extension/web service that packs selected open tabs into a neat conformant .epub file.

0: https://epub.press

I save webpages as PDF because they retain the images and fonts of the original page. One issue I run into is that sticky headers/footers used on websites often obscure top/bottom text of the page when exported to PDF. This can be addressed by using UBO to remove the sticky DOM elements before saving, but it's a bit of a hassle.

singlefile browser extension is quite good in this regard

Others have recommended ArchiveBox, I will recommend using any bookmarking tool that fires off a web request to the Wayback Machine to archive a page when you create the bookmark.

I have a bookmarklet that points to:

  javascript:(function(){daurl='https://web.archive.org/save/';if(location.href.indexOf('http')!=0){input=prompt('URL:','http://');if(input!=null){location.href=daurl+input}}else{location.href=daurl+location.href;}})();

This has the keyword "way" in my Firefox bookmark.

So when I'm on a page I want to save, I just press Ctrl-L (to focus the URL bar), then type "way" to save the page on Wayback Machine.

This is something a browser could in theory do for you.

How much disk space did that consume?

I like the idea that in addition to saving the page, you can annotate it as well.

Not a noticeable amount in this age when even expensive SSD storage has multiple gigabytes. Even pages with multiple images just aren’t that big on a typical hard drive.

But I'm still backing up offsite and have to consider that as well.

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