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Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday November 5, 2005

Bill Bennett

By the bookmark

While a lot of online material is worthless junk, every so often you stumble across pure gold. When this happens, you'll almost certainly want to access the information again.

Bookmarking is the most obvious way to track useful web pages. Browsers generally have built-in tools to help manage bookmark lists - in Internet Explorer, they are known as Favorites.

Finding your way back to a site with a bookmark has its limitations. Some websites rarely change, but others update frequently. It's possible to click on a bookmark only to find the page you're after is no longer there.

You can guard against the fleeting nature of some web pages by saving the important ones onto your hard drive. Most browsers allow you to do this from the File menu.

Normally, when you save a page it is stored on your computer as a document containing the HTML code that's used by web-page builders, along with a folder containing the graphics and associated bits of data. This quickly gets messy.

As an alternative, Microsoft's Internet Explorer can store pages in a special format known as Web Page Complete, binding the code and pictures together in a single file. Although this makes pages easier to manage, it's not necessarily the best way of storing and retrieving your online treasure.

EverNote (www.evernote.com) is a great free tool for people who frequently mine the internet for nuggets of information. The program allows you to clip text, pictures and movies and to complete web pages from the net and store them in a database that is represented by a long scrolling tape down the centre of your computer's screen.

Entries are date-stamped, so you can scroll up and down the timeline to find stored data. You can also categorise notes as you store them and find them that way or simply use the text search tool.

You're not restricted to web data. You can store text from Word documents and other common file formats, too. There are also templates allowing you to create "to do" lists or shopping lists.

EverNote is a great tool for researchers and others needing to store large amounts of disconnected data.