Canonfire!

Tue Sep 13, 2011 8:27 pm Best means of archiving web sources

I've been saving copies of every GH tidbit in sight since I discovered the awesome freeware program tinypdf.

Having personal copies has become important as I realize many of the online materials I took for granted in the Nineties have disappeared. Even Youtube is no longer the wild and wholly place it was just five years ago; maybe the Waybackback Machine could go down the same road with content pulled at the behest of IP holders. Also more new products exist only as electronic sources, forever to disappear like The East Corner or so many WotC articles. Finally, our media giants are consolidating and we're one Tea-Party-controlled Senate/President away from the death of net neutrality.

How much archiving do the rest of you do? What do you use? "Save as"? Screen grabs? Just bookmarks? Something better than tinypdf?

Sat Sep 17, 2011 3:10 pm

Good topic!

I realized the same thing some time ago. And trying to research the geography of the Flanaess in the depth I'm trying make it necessary to build a library of some sort. I had a very extensive trove of books, modules and magazines. Probably one of the biggest collections of Greyhawk material in Europe that I had tried to build since the early 80s.

But when I started mapping in earnest I realized that I needed a better way to find relevant material, so I went digital. I cataloged things into a homemade database using MS Access but abandoned it early and simply stored all the saved web-pages and pdf's and whatnot on my hard drive in a tree of directories and it worked s well and required hardly no work to create and maintain, and I put it all in Dropbox to have it backed up.

but now I have found what I have been looking for all this time, Evernote!
Check it out at http://www.evernote.com
It is an digital notebook/database/depository and more for all your digital data. You can put almost anything in it and index and search through it. The basic service is free but a premium account which let you put in a GB of data a month cost a bit of money. I have fed my account a GB every month for over a year now and I have soon every bit of Greyhawk snippet of info I have come across in it. Books modules, magazines, maps the works, all indexed and searchable, love it!

You can use it as a Win or Mac program or log in through a browser. They also have iPhone and iPad apps, so now I can research and read anywhere and take notes whenever and wherever I want.

Notes and notebooks can be shared so there is a possibility to work together on building that Great Greyhawk library.

As I get deep into this topic I can report on something I'll try and put to good use soon for my future Greyhawk gaming and that is RealmWorks. Check it out here: http://www.wolflair.com/index.php?context=realm_works
It seem to be the Campaign management tool I have been looking for. And it also seem to have online features like sharing and co working. It would be so cool if we could share things using a format that was directly usable at the game table. That would make everyone's campaigns richer and better.

This became a very long and babbly answer but I got carried away.

Anna

Wed Oct 05, 2011 8:22 pm

Thanks Anna! I finally got around to downloading Evernote and I'll try it out. It looks like it can even search for text in images, which is nice. Hopefully it can find text in PDF's that aren't word-searchable. That seems to be the one disadvantage of all the files I've created with TinyPDF.

I also found PDF-XChange (http://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-viewer), which is an easy way to word search a PDF library on one computer. It doesn't slow down the computer with active indexing.