Evernote tip: Easier web clipping using Readability

May 21st, 2009 | Comments (20) | Trackbacks (0) |

I’ve previously written about how I use Evernote to organize my youth ministry, and my use of the program has only expanded since then. Consequently, I am constantly tweaking the way I use Evernote to make both the program and my time as efficient as possible.

I recently discovered a killer (and super simple) method for using Evernote’s Web Clipper in tandem with arc90’s Readability to import articles/blogs into the program. Here’s how it’s done.

I’ll be using this article from Youth Worker Journal as the example throughout. Here’s what the page looks like in a browser (you can click any of the images below for a full-sized version):

The article that I actually want to save and clip into Evernote is surrounded by tons of noise that I don’t want. If I use the Web Clipper to clip the entire page, here’s what I get:

If I scroll about halfway down the note, I am finally at the start of the text I want to save, but it’s still surrounded by all the noise from the original page:

At this point, some of you might be wondering why I don’t use one of the most useful features of the Web Clipper — text highlighting. One can highlight text and/or images from any page and clip it all into Evernote with ease, which is really handy, but in this case even if I highlight all the text and clip it, there’s still an advertisement stuck in the middle of my note:

Utilizing Readability, there’s no need for highlighting text in the browser and no unnecessary removal of unwanted text or images once the article has been clipped into Evernote. In fact, just two clicks does the trick.

Once I’ve added the Readability bookmarklet to my bookmark toolbar, I visit the page I want to clip into Evernote, and click the Readability bookmarklet. Doing so results in something like this:

Now, instead of a great article surrounded by distracting noise, there is only the text of the article itself — and without that pesky advertisement. I click the Web Clipper on my browser to clip the resulting page into Evernote and I get the following result:

Voilà! A clutter-free version of the article I want imported into Evernote with just two clicks. I hope you find this helpful; let me know if you do!