A couple weeks ago I mentioned my frustrating with looking at older articles I or other people have written only to find that the source material those blog entries were based on had gone 404. That’s also, by the way, why I don’t really understand the point of blogs that are nothing more than links — visit the archives of those sites sometimes and they’re basically worthless because of that problem.
Anyway, Conversant is flexible enough that I could put together a system in a couple hours — without having to do any programming or scripting — so I can store copies of all the articles I’m referencing with the blog entries that reference them.
But what about things I run across that I want to save but that I’m not necessarily blogging about? I’ve used a variety of tools over the years to try to solve this problem, but none of them are as elegant as Furl.Net.
Currently in beta, with Furl you sign up for an account — free at the moment — and then add a little “Furl It” icon to your Bookmarks toolbar. Then when you find an HTML page you want to archive, simply press the “Furl It” bookmark and up pops a dialog box where you can assign a number of metadata to the page to be saved, such as a rating, a topic, keywords, description, etc. Hit “Save” on the form and the page is added to your Furl.Net archive.
This wouldn’t be of much use if a) it didn’t work seamlessly, b) it did’t have a nice interface to search through and sort your archive, and c) it didn’t have a way to get your archive off of Furl and on to your local hard drive.
Fortunately, the Furl.Net folks have done a wonderful job of covering all of the bases there. The process works flawlessly from my testing, the interface — especially with all of the metadata options it provides — is wonderful, and there are ways to get your data out today with additional export methods in development (today you can only get the links out via XML, but the developer promises a full export of all data via ZIP or some other compressed filed method is in the works).