Well that will teach me. I saw a passage earlier today that I liked, and thought that I would build a blog post around. “I’ll remember where the text is," I said to myself, “I’ll pick it up later." Remembering it now and wanting to write that post, I have no idea where I saw it. Lesson learnt. Next time I... www.crossingthethreshold.net

@crossingthethreshold Hah hah, I so often think that too and then never remember. I now have a saved plain text file that's always open. It's named working.txt. I save random stuff in there. I've just set up a Keyboard Maestro button to save the clipboard to the end of that file. I also have a TextExpander action that grabs the Title and URL from the front Safari window (and in one version adds that info in front of any text I've just copied).

@Miraz Those are really nice automation ideas. Thanks for sharing.

@amit Is Readwise Reader the place you read everything? I tried it but I felt it was a little too clunky (even though I was crazy impressed with their Mac Safari extension).

@sherif Hope they inspire. 😀

@Miraz It sure did 🙂 Although for me creating the workflow to add or highlight is only one part of the puzzle. The second, more difficult part, is having a habit or system to go back to the note or wherever the collected snippet went and revisiting it, thinking about it, or taking some kind of action based on it.

Actions like opening a tab, bookmarking, adding to a read-later service, all feel like opening threads, and I end up with many open threads and no system to close them.

Do you have a structure for when you (re)visit your working.txt, or does it just seem to work itself out?

@sherif so this might be out of context, but I'm impressed with MB's bookmarking tool, meant just for that: bookmark, later go in and highlight whatever is needed (it downloads the text), URL is linked automatically in your post.

Then I use Emacs org-mode, but that's another beast entirely.

@sherif Not everything yet - mostly the articles I want to make notes on. I don't subscribe to feeds or newsletter there.

@sherif For me working.txt is a file of temporary 'current' stuff rather than saving for the record. For example, a few weeks ago I saved a link for when I updated a post (on another blog). Yesterday I got round to updating that post so retrieved the link, used it, then deleted that entry in working.txt. Sometimes I scroll through the whole thing and use or delete specific entries. Not a big system though. Recently I expanded my process by collecting from working.txt all the recipes I want to try, moving them into their own document and adding a button to choose which file to save to.

@jtr Sorry I’m confused. When you say “later go in and highlight” and “it downloads the text for you”, are you referring to Reader or MB bookmarking? If the latter that would be news to me! But if the former, do you have a way of having all bookmarked posts in MB automatically end up in Reader?

@amit Out of curiosity, what do you do with the notes after you make them?

I have Reader’s Obsidian plugin which downloads all my ebook highlights and notes to files in Obsidian (which is uh-mazing). But right now I feel like I’m not making good use of those highlights independently of the Reader app’s daily review (which as far as I can tell doesn’t include highlights from articles, only books).

@Miraz Okay! So working.txt is an even more apt name than I realized. An actual extension of working memory.

@Miraz Keyboard Maestro to the rescue again.

@crossingthethreshold Indeed!

@sherif So, I was only half right. Yes, the MB bookmarking tools does download the text (import the URL) and allows you to highlight, but only on premium ($10): news.micro.blog/2020/09/2...

@jtr Ah yeah, that makes sense, I'm on the baby plan, but I'm very intrigued about how M.b. makes that work. Maybe I'll find out one day.