chattr +a -V

I've posted about some helpful Firefox extensions in Session Saver Firefox extension, Enhanced History Manager Firefox extension and Firefox extension to edit and preview CSS on the fly. There's another one which I've tried to get working in my 'mike' profile, but it fails, not finding a script. That's ScrapBook, which allows you to save (including linked files, say, including mp3s), annotate, organize (tree display like bookmarks), edit and search (including regular expressions) web pages. I had looked at the extension via Leo Sauermann's entry scrapbook, Edd Dumbill's entry Firefox ScrapBook extension, and the New York Times' article CIRCUITS: NEWS WATCH; Add-On Allows Firefox Browser Users To Maintain an Archive of Web Pages. (Unfortunately, the Times' archive policy means you now have to purchase the article.) I don't remember which of these was first, but I'm interested in tools to organize web searching results, and seeing what ScrapBook says it can do, I wanted to give it a try.

When the install failed, Gomita, the program's author, emailed me that I need to create a new profile before installing ScrapBook.

$: /usr/bin/firefox -profilemanager &

will start Firefox with the profile manager, whether or not Firefox is already running. So, you can have Firefox running with one profile, and use the '-profilemanager' option to start another instance of Firefox with a different existing profile, or first create another profile and then start Firefox using that new profile. If Firefox is already running and you just do $: /usr/bin/firefox &, the profile currently in use will be used again for the new instance of Firefox.

ScrapBook opened in a sidebar
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Right clicking on the page brings up options, which now include 'Capture Page' and 'Capture Page As ...'. It's the latter which will grab linked files, whether image, sound, movie, archive, or all linked web pages.

ScrapBook - Capture Detail [what will ScrapBook save: options]

Left clicking on the sidebar entries opens up the saved entry in the browser's window, and right clicking on the sidebar entry pops up a menu including 'New Note'. Here's the main ScrapBook page annotated with some stuff I typed, and with some stuff from the page, swiped and middle mouse button clicked to paste (X windows style):

ScrapBook note, including swiped and pasted text
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Now liferea, my aggregator, will open pages from the blogs to which I subscribe, inside liferea, or in a browser (Program --> Preferences --> Browser to specify what browser and how). I just tried opening a linked page in another Firefox tab, with Firefox running both profiles 'mike' and 'scrapbook', 'mike' profile being the first profile in use. Unfortunately, liferea opened the page in a 'mike' tab, not a 'scrapbook' tab.

In the ScrapBook sidebar, there's a 'Tools' menu, which among other things, does an 'Open' on the ScrapBook directory:

ScrapBook directory
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Drilling down one level into the data directory, here's how ScrapBook stores the files and notes:

Saved ScrapBook material
(right click and 'View image' to see larger, more detailed version)

Not helpful: they're named by the creation time and sorted by name. I have no problem with the latter, but it'd be nice to have a symlink or other means to give the directories informative, descriptive, names.

When I create a new note, it's not named or saved, it seems, until I left mouse click on the note in the sidebar: the 'Writing Notes' section at ScraBook's Features (3) page doesn't make this clear: 'Auto-saving when you close a note or open another one' is all it says on that page about saving.

It looks as if you can share ScrapBook data among other users, by clicking on the 'Tools' drop down in the ScrapBook toolbar, selecting 'Import / Export' and saving the output to a directory, say on a USB stick. I suppose if a shared directory or drive were already mounted, saving there would be possible. My profile directory is read - write - execute only by user 'mike', so a different user can't directly access the original data therein; maybe by exporting to a location with less restrictive permissions would others have access? Let's see ... going to 'Tools --> Settings --> Advance' from the ScrapBook toolbar allows specifying a different saved data destination. You don't have to set the destination before saving the data: going to 'Tools --> Import / Export' brings up a file manager where you can specify a directory and then drag and drop files, folders or both into the specified directory. But ... the exported files and directories inherit permissions from the original files and directories, so if the directory you're exporting to has less restrictive perms (say world writable), the less restrictive perms are not inherited. Too bad, IMO, as inheriting the less restrictive perms, or making that inheritance an option, would make sharing easier. If the directory is on a separate partition, maybe setting the umask and gid in /etc/fstab would work, but that would ... open up other problems.

I wonder whether you could put the ScrapBook files on a website and edit those files?

The author has a page where ScrapBook users can vote on to do tasks, a nice way to respond to the user community. That page was last modified May 5, 2005, and since then ScrapBook v0.15.4 was released. There are questionnaires and an rss feed for the program as well.

All in all, ScrapBook is a very powerful Firefox extension and I can see I'll be giving it a real workout.