I started my writing career off over a decade ago at a site called DownloadSquad. We covered “Web 2.0” companies back when “Web 2.0 companies” was a term people used. I wrote a zillion posts for them, or at least a few thousand. The amount of those articles that are still online: zero.
Yes, I can still read a ton of it on the WayBack machine, but I also wish I’d saved more of it when I had the chance.
DownloadSquad changed owners a few times while I worked for them, and eventually “Web 2.0” wasn’t really a thing people cared about anymore. I can’t remember the site’s actual time of death, but at some point (actually mildly recently) the site’s current owner decided to take the whole thing offline, and all my years of work along with it.
Websites change. Websites go out of business. This week I came across a new browser extension that makes saving those sites a little easier, WebSatchel.
Obviously, not many people are going to have the specific use case that I do. That said, there are plenty of reasons to save a website, be it a story you enjoyed reading and might want to read again or even a recipe for something you’d like to try out later.
Yes, that’s what Bookmarks are for (and Wayback Machine has its own extension for saving things), but WebSatchel takes things a step further and allows you to annotate the page as you’re saving, ultimately making it easier to find exactly what you’re looking for down the line.
For instance, you might annotate a recipe for turkey with “Made Thanksgiving 2018” or “Use less dill next time.” Later on when you pull the page up, your annotations will be there along with the original text that was on the page.
Pages you save can be searched for by keyword, date, and page content which also makes finding them a bit easier than your standard bookmark (unless you’re a far more organized person than I).
So you don’t even need to remember where that turkey recipe was from, just that it was turkey.
Free users can save up to three pages a day and can store up to 1GB of files. A Premium tier ups that to 100GB of storage and unlimited saved pages a day for $7.99 per month. That said, unless you’re planning on saving a TON of stuff, that free option should work just fine.
If nothing else, it can cut down on that growing list of bookmarks.