Planting new varietals in my digital garden

Back in February of this year I realized that this blog could be more than a blog - that by virtue of being a static site I can maintain a local files+folders structure and use that to publish my own personal wiki to the web.

More on all of that in the original post here: building a digital garden.

Then a few weeks ago I came across Screenotate. It’s a dead simple mac app that saves all your screenshots as web-pages on your computer with URL of the page saved, meta-data and OCR-text of the screenshot. See it in action here:

⭐️ I'm releasing Screenotate 2.0, my Mac/Windows screenshot+OCR+context app: https://t.co/K8guHxQZZW
When you take a screenshot, it recognizes text inside + the originating URL, then saves it as a self-contained HTML file for later search pic.twitter.com/a27bdWwA6K

— Omar Rizwan (@rsnous) November 21, 2017

This set off a lightbulb in my head. What if I can use screenotate to save new kinds of files - HTML snapshots of pages. Image+meta-data+text. Perfect. Archive-friendly and shareable screenshots that take two seconds to save into my personal wiki. Perfect.

And so that’s what I did.

For an example - take a look at this Pedagogy wiki I just started building:

/wiki/pedagogy

And for the lazy, here’s a direct link to a screenshot HTML file saved by Screenotate.

It’s become my default mode for capturing snippets and shoving them into my wiki. Nice.

To extend the wiki-as-garden metaphor I feel like I’ve begun planting a new kind of varietal (page) into my garden (wiki). Thanks Omar!

Note: I’m embedding the Screenotate files as iframes at the moment which… is probably not the best idea. Large images also don’t work very well in a small iframe window. I tried using the CSS scale property to show a thumbnail property but run into the limits of my CSS skills. Anyway - what I’m saying is it’s a work in progress and likely not perfectly coded…

Update #1 Oct 2019 - if you like this post check out this post on building custom research and clipping tools. V cool