throwaway13411

There was also a service where you could enter your collection of quotes/snippets and it would send you an email daily with a random quote.

Anyone remember what it was called?

Sent you a mail

I believe that a different tool is needed for capturing notes and a different one for presentation.

Evernote does the capturing well enough. Both Evernote and OneNote allow capturing parts of a web page with their web clipper but OneNote's workflow is cumbersome.

I think about this like in writing (pg's model of writing essays), where you write a lot of ideas down in no particular order, dumping random thoughts as they come and then on subsequent "passes" you try to bring the scattered thoughts in order, arrange them in paragraphs etc.

Another tangential idea is Jupyter notebooks for research ("research" as in studying a topic). For example if you're researching a topic, you can use Evernote web clipper to do all the capturing from various webpages and then you would have curate/organize this information in a "jupyter notebook for text"/blog post. Maybe offer the functionality to add comments/marginalia (like distill.pub's implementation, e.g. https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-parameterizations/).

Drawing snippets from multiple web pages and books also brings Ted Nelson's transclusion concept to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion

Evernote web clipper

I really wanted to like Notion. For me it's completely unusable.

Notion feels like the opposite of the Unix tenet, "do one thing and do it well".

I was somewhat excited when they released their web clipper recently but I found out it doesn't allow to save snippets from a page (only allows to save the url), which makes it useless for me.

Also the emojis are very offputting. Maybe it works well if the user wants to organize a trip with friends but I want to use it as a research tool.

I had seen this but it wouldn't work well for my case because the link leads to the article url, whereas it should lead to the "expanded" saved snippet saved from that page. Having a link pointing to the original url is still useful though.

Evernote does something like this (web clipper). In the left pane it shows the first lines of the saved fragment, in the right pane it show the full saved fragment and it also includes a link to the original work

Evernote works well for saving, but not for presentation. and its search is sluggish with a bad UX.

I like search on HN (by Algolia), it feels snappy and I can find what I'm looking for relatively fast.

In other words, I want to curate my Evernote notes list in a web app where design is a first class citizen. That doesn't mean pompous or flashy stuff, for example I find HN's design serves its content well and pg's site does the same for essays.

Sometimes I think about taking a Wordpress theme with masonry and stripping it down so that it has no visual distractions other than the content (and then adding the extra functionality needed). I'm not sure if that's better than building something from the ground up.

If anyone wants to chat about this, send me an email.

I've been thinking about it for a long time and have several ideas and opinions.

  Images are mostly a superset of text use cases. You can always put great text into an image, and doing so gives is more context and emotional color.

I disagree, it should be optimized for high density text-only content.

HN attracts the kind of people it attracts because of its simplistic design, no images and focus on content.