Power Up Your Blogging With Scrapbook

Are you a writer, blogger, student or researcher? If the answer is “yes”, you've probably already tried many note-taking and productivity apps. Perhaps you have a favorite one, but seeing how often new solutions emerge, it might be time to try out something new.

Scrapbook is a popular Firefox addon with a generous list of features. Though the aforementioned groups of people will find it particularly useful, this addon can do miracles for anyone's browsing habits, and it will improve the way you collect and organize information.

Scrapbook's main features make it a surprisingly versatile tool, because it can be used for various activities: from taking and compiling notes for an essay, brainstorming ideas for an article, creating an image collection, marking and grouping websites for later reading, to downloading entire web pages, modifying their content and exporting them to a different file format.

Like all other Firefox addons, Scrapbook can be installed from the official Mozilla website. Once it's added to your browser, you can choose the ways in which you want Scrapbook to integrate with it. This means that you can access Scrapbook from the main context (right-click) menu, add icons to both the navigation and the add-on bar, or create a separate Scrapbook menu in the main menu bar. Scrapbook supports keyboard shortcuts for some of its actions, and you can define them in the Options dialogue.

How does it work?

The main Scrapbook window opens as a sidebar within Firefox, and it contains your saved items, bookmarked sites, and notes organized into folders and displayed in tree view. You can add new folders and items either by clicking on the icons under the search box, or by right-clicking anywhere in the sidebar and selecting the desired option. Bookmarks are colored differently than the rest of the content. They function similarly to Firefox bookmarks – you can bookmark sites with Scrapbook to save their links and access them later - but they are not saved in the same file nor connected with your existing Firefox bookmarks in any way.

Files and folders in Scrapbook actually exist in your Firefox profile folder and can be accessed using your file manager. Basically, Scrapbook serves as a vehicle for manipulating these files from the browser. The support for multiple Scrapbook source folders can be enabled in the Options dialogue, which means that you can store your notes in different folders and set up Scrapbook to control them for you.

The Tools menu in the sidebar contains a number of options. You can perform an emergency repair of favicons and the tree folder structure in Scrapbook sidebar, sort the entire tree or calculate total size of the items. You can output selected files and folders to HTML, as well as import existing folders or an old backup of Scrapbook content. Save Multiple URLs opens a text box in which you can enter a number of links for Scrapbook to grab all at once, or you can add all opened tabs to Scrapbook. This can be useful if you're in a hurry and need to close Firefox before you can save your work.

There's also Combine Wizard, which lets you put together selected files and export them to a text file or a single web page. The wizard can be accessed through the Manage module, or separately from the Tools menu in the sidebar.

Scrapbook allows for basic file management in this module – you can rearrange and remove items, add comments, change favicons and rename items from the Properties dialogue of each item. The search function is powerful and especially convenient if you have a lot of files stored in multiple folders, because it can search through both the content of your files and their names and other metadata. It supports phrase matching, case sensitive search, and advanced users will be happy to hear that they can also use regular expressions.

Start Scrapbooking!

Though it might seem like a complicated tool, Scrapbook is really easy to use. There are several ways to add content to Scrapbook:

• write notes directly into Scrapbook by choosing New Note in the sidebar
• drag-and-drop the favicon into Scrapbook sidebar to save a web page
• add all opened tabs or enter multiple URLs from Tools menu
• select text on a web page and add it to Scrapbook by choosing Save Selection (As)
• add images to Scrapbook by drag-and-dropping them into the sidebar
• save the entire web page by clicking Save Page or Save Page As...

The Save Page As option offers advanced features which allow you to adjust the depth of your download. You can download the entire web page, including attached content such as images, audio, PDF documents or even videos.

You don't have to create a folder before saving pages; you can add them all to the Root folder (which is the main Scrapbook folder) and make new folders later, then move the downloaded items into them.

When the content is saved to your computer and indexed by Scrapbook, you can start editing it. Note that you can only edit saved content, not bookmarked sites. To edit a file, open it from the Scrapbook sidebar, and a toolbar will appear at the bottom of the browser window. It provides you the option to highlight text, add sticky notes, remove selected elements, save or undo changes, as well as the search option and the DOM Eraser.

DOM stands for Document Object Model and it represents the elements of a web page as they are rendered by the browser. If you click the DOM Eraser button, the web page you're editing will be divided into elements as they are written in the HTML code. For example, if you hover over some part of the page, a red square will appear, denoting the limits of that area. A left click will remove that area – and its contents – from the web page. This is useful if you save a web page that has ads or images, and you only want text. Instead of copying and pasting that text, you can simply remove the unwanted elements and save the “clean” page to Scrapbook.

If Firefox is your main browser, you should definitely try Scrapbook. It's one of the best Firefox addons we've reviewed; stable, efficient and flexible. There are no restrictions in terms of how you can use it – whether you see it as a tool for temporary bookmarks, a collector for scraps of text or a storage for memes and reaction GIFs you often use and need quick access to, a web page downloader  or a tool to organize your research sources, Scrapbook will not let you down.

Ivana Isadora Devcic is a freelance writer, copyeditor and translator fluent in English, Swedish, Croatian and Norwegian. She's a Linux user and KDE fan interested in web design, productivity and personal branding. Ivana tweets about the world around her as @skadinna.