Do you do anything with eye-opening/thought-provoking text content?
I found it difficult to formulate a topic for this post, but I hope that you'll all "get" what I'm talking about.
You're reading something, maybe in a book, maybe an article online, maybe a comment on Tildes, or Reddit, or a Tweet, anything really.
Do you do anything with it? Do you save it somehow? Do you write it out in a dedicated notebook? Do you share it? If you do, how do you share it?
I'd love to hear about your approaches to this topic, the tools you use, what you like and don't like about your current workflows, the types of content you like to save, how you share it both with people that are close to you in real life, people who are close to you online, and maybe even strangers?
Also, how do you use it once it all ends up wherever it ends up? Do you even use it? Or do you just like the feeling of curating your own personal archive of things you read that meant something to you at some point?
I'll get the ball rolling:
I've gone through a long journey with this myself, starting with bookmarking older services like Instapaper and Pinboard, trying out newer services like Readwise before eventually creating my own (totally worth all the time it took to create now that I have my own "perfect workflow" to save everything from Kindle highlights to Tildes comments!)
I learn a lot from high quality comments online, so it's really important for me to be able to save them, however, I don't trust the built-in functions on sites like Twitter, Reddit etc. (for reasons hopefully now obvious š ), and because I like to be able to search through them all in one place easily.
The main reason that I refer back to them is usually because I want to share something in conversation (either in person or online), and it's nice to be able to link to the source text quickly. I also like to be able to give people a glimpse into what I'm reading on topics that are important to me, and recently I'm thinking that the best way to do this is to go back to the 90s/00s and embed RSS feeds of my saved highlights on my website, split by topic.
I'm generally okay with the idea that I'm never going to "use" everything I save for anything particularly big or grand; it just feels nice to have a trail of text content that has been influencing my thinking over a long time period to look back on from time to time.
For me, nothing really beats the simplicity of a folder full of markdown or plaintext files. Discipline in taking the notes is the key, not the storage method. A folder full of text files is:
grep;There are probably more efficient ways of organizing a vast amount of information, but honestly, if your personal library of content gets so large that you can barely manage your hoard, isn't that an indicator that maybe prioritization is more important than finding ways to collect more? I want to feel that I've mastered what I know, not that I am barely hanging on to it.
All of this is just my personal priorities, of course.
This reminds me of how Iāve implemented:
ā https://maggieappleton.com/basb
ā https://www.linkingyourthinking.com/download-lyt-kit
Applications:
I've struggled with managing this type of activity throughout the years and haven't been very successful. Your app looks quite good and I'm going to give it a shot. It looks like you cover a lot of different input mechanisms, but I'm not seeing anything for Android. Is there a way to log content from Android?
If you have Discord, you can send comment links and highlights to NotadoBot, otherwise, if Android has something like iOS Shortcuts, you can create one that calls the API with your token to save from the share menu (I don't have any Android devices so I'm not sure about this one)
Thanks, it may be possible using Android natively, or non-natively with Tasker. Thanks!
I spend a lot of time reading on the Web.
When I find a page or post I really enjoy or otherwise want to keep for later, I save it using Pinboard. I have an archival account there, so it will automatically snapshot the page and make it full-text-searchable. I also make liberal use of tags. This makes it easy to find cool things I've read previously, even if the page is later deleted. I currently have over 4,400 pages archived with Pinboard.
When I find a website I like, I'll sometimes even archive the whole thing.
I don't generally share the things I archive. It's for my own enjoyment.
Archiving interesting Web content is important to me. It's always disappointing to go back looking for something you saw in the past onky to find that it's been deleted forever. If you see something worth keeping, save it.
I have a file named 'stuff' and if I read something that I ever think is remotely important, or that I should know for later, or that I found amusing, I copy and paste it to the top of the file. Like this post. It's 3.6M big... I should probably come up with something a bit more organized.
I (try to) read the New Yorker every week. I have a print subscription and love their long-form journalism (don't care much for what's going on in NYC itself).
I'll often tear out articles, either to give to people I know or to keep for myself (usually because a cause/organization seems interesting and I want to research it more later).
It's more for links than for general text content, but I wrote a website to store links I find interesting and search for them by tag later. It's turned out pretty handy at times when I talk to people about a topic and can quickly find references and articles. I also make a quick browser extension which will pre-fill the form with the current page, and it also handles the URL query parameters that get used when sharing to a website on mobile.
I have wondered about using some form of journaling or a more text-based approach, but I have very perfectionist tendencies and I know if I try to wrote a summary of why I found something interesting I'd just struggle getting the words right. I've managed to find/make a balance that works for me by limiting what I can store to just a link, a description (autofilled to the page's title), and a set of tags. I don't find myself saving everything in it, but if I get the inkling I'll be coming back to it then I'll save it. The tag search is pretty quick to use (with some rules about lifting up matches with multiple tags), and I sort of just know what tags to use when looking for something.