I envision using EagleFiler to track little web snippets that I copy from Safari and paste into an RTF record. Although I may use a Web Archive on occasion to capture an entire web page, I would more likely just copy a portion of a web page, and probably capture several web snippets to one RTF record over time.
EagleFiler does a good job at tracking the Add Date and Modify Date for the RTF record, but it does not have any “insert current date” in the RTF text data. It is easy to drag the web page title from Safari to the RTF file and also manually copy the actural URL http:// info, but I’d rather not do all these things manually.
What I’d like to do is to somehow automate (perhaps with a script) pasting in info about the web snippet - Current Date, Web Page Title, and Web Address. For example:
10/14/08 ---- C-Command Software: Mac OS X Applications ---- http://c-command.com/
The dashes might help this info stand out as a divider, as would a different color font, etc.
EagleFiler is designed to treat each snippet as a separate document. If you import the snippets by dragging and dropping the text into EagleFiler, it will automatically create an RTF file and store the URL and date. (I’m working on making it also grab the page title.) This lets you organize your snippets into folders and tag them, so I think it’s more flexible than combining everything into one RTF file.
If you want to end up with a single RTF file, you could (a) combine the existing RTF files, or (b) try to find another application that can easily capture the snippets the way that you want. I’m not aware of any software that makes either of these tasks easy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t out there.
I was envisioning placing a few related web snippets in an RTF file, not dozens or hundreds, and over time, there would be many RTF files - some might have a snippet or two, some might have a dozen or two.
Guess I’ll have to rethink how I’d use EagleFiler for small web snippets. When surfing I’ll often find a few different web snippets on a particular topic I’d like to save. If I save each one to a different file (and, that certainly is easy with EagleFiler), I’ll end up with many small web snippet files over time. It appears that each of these files are automatically named the the first text line or so of the snippet - and often these names are very long and strange. I know they can be renamed, but that’s an added step.
At the time of capture, I know these snippets are related and it seems fairly efficient to me to place them together in one RTF file, and tag it if needed. If, on the otherhand, I save each one in a seperate RTF file, I’ll need to apply tags multiple times, or depend on the search facility to locate each text snippet file at a later time. This seems less efficient to me.
I do need to use the trial both ways to see which works best for me. EagleFiler looks to be a very useful organizational tool - very full featured, but extremely easy to use.
In this situation, I’d probably put them in a folder and tag the folder. Later, if you find one snippet by searching, you could use the View > Select Source command to select the folder and see the rest of the related snippets.
Your all-in-one-RTF-file idea is certainly a valid desire, but it’s not currently a workflow that could be very smooth in EagleFiler. And due to the way AppleScript and the various applications work, it’s not the kind of thing that would be easy to script.
EagleFiler 1.3 adds a Capture With Options command. This lets you tag Web pages as you import them. It also remembers the tags between invocations, so it’s easy to import a bunch of related Web pages and assign the same tags to them.
It will show up in the inspector if you dragged the text from a Web Kit–based browser, e.g. Safari or NetNewsWire. Starting with EagleFiler 1.3, it uses the Web archive format rather than RTF, since that better preserves the formatting. The Mozilla browsers do not provide the necessary information in the drag to support this feature.
Yes, unfortunately Services do not provide the same information as drag and drop. I asked Apple about this a while ago, and they said they’re working on it.