
Ask HN: Pinterest for Text? - throwaway13411
I keep text snippets saved from webpages (thousands of them) and would like to present this collection online.<p>I haven&#x27;t found anything good enough for this. 
Ideally it should be like Pinterest (or maybe Instagram) for text, an unlimited canvas of text previews (masonry.js style or stacked design). A search function would also be useful.<p>I was thinking that this description is close to a blog but I&#x27;d like it to be optimized for displaying a lot of different snippets (as in Pinterest and giving the choice to the user to &quot;peruse&quot; through the entries quickly) but clicking on an entry should result in expanding into full content (again like Pinterest).<p>A Hugo blog offers a clean view of the titles (one after the other) but no preview of the actual content. Wordpress is optimized for only a posts per page. On the other end something like Bret Victor&#x27;s quote page is too simple and doesn&#x27;t offer the &quot;read more&quot; feature: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;worrydream.com&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;<p>Anyone has seen anything out there that matches my needs? I don&#x27;t mind paid services.
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FelipeCortez
Shameless plug: bmarks.net

I could implement a text preview feature if you want. Currently you can have
long titles and descriptions with Markdown support

Here’s an example with articles I have saved:
[https://bmarks.net/felipecortez/tag/articles/?expand=all](https://bmarks.net/felipecortez/tag/articles/?expand=all)

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devons
I use Pinboard for this. It doesn't have the masonry-style layout, but it's
quite functional.

You can make your posts public and they'll be shown on your usage page, for
example:
[http://pinboard.in/u:incredimike/](http://pinboard.in/u:incredimike/)

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throwaway13411
I had seen this but it wouldn't work well for my case because the link leads
to the article url, whereas it should lead to the "expanded" saved snippet
saved from that page. Having a link pointing to the original url is still
useful though.

Evernote does something like this (web clipper). In the left pane it shows the
first lines of the saved fragment, in the right pane it show the full saved
fragment and it also includes a link to the original work

Evernote works well for saving, but not for presentation. and its search is
sluggish with a bad UX.

I like search on HN (by Algolia), it feels snappy and I can find what I'm
looking for relatively fast.

In other words, I want to curate my Evernote notes list in a web app where
design is a first class citizen. That doesn't mean pompous or flashy stuff,
for example I find HN's design serves its content well and pg's site does the
same for essays.

Sometimes I think about taking a Wordpress theme with masonry and stripping it
down so that it has no visual distractions other than the content (and then
adding the extra functionality needed). I'm not sure if that's better than
building something from the ground up.

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throwaway13411
I believe that a different tool is needed for capturing notes and a different
one for presentation.

Evernote does the capturing well enough. Both Evernote and OneNote allow
capturing parts of a web page with their web clipper but OneNote's workflow is
cumbersome.

I think about this like in writing (pg's model of writing essays), where you
write a lot of ideas down in no particular order, dumping random thoughts as
they come and then on subsequent "passes" you try to bring the scattered
thoughts in order, arrange them in paragraphs etc.

Another tangential idea is Jupyter notebooks for research ("research" as in
studying a topic). For example if you're researching a topic, you can use
Evernote web clipper to do all the capturing from various webpages and then
you would have curate/organize this information in a "jupyter notebook for
text"/blog post. Maybe offer the functionality to add comments/marginalia
(like distill.pub's implementation, e.g.
[https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-
parameterizations/](https://distill.pub/2018/differentiable-
parameterizations/)).

Drawing snippets from multiple web pages and books also brings Ted Nelson's
transclusion concept to mind:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion)

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cweagans
> A Hugo blog offers a clean view of the titles (one after the other) but no
> preview of the actual content.

This is not hardcoded behavior. You can change this in a theme pretty easily.

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FabianBeiner
Now defunct QUOTE.fm tried to do this for a year or so. Until they ran out of
money. Archive.org link:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20150324043301/http://quote.fm/w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20150324043301/http://quote.fm/welcome)

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macando
I thought about this for months some years ago. Is there a way to bookmark,
tag and index only parts of a web page? Like paragraphs, diagrams or bits of
video. I often find true gems of advice and insights among mountains of fluff
and later forget about them.

Edit: I don't want to watch the whole game I just want highlights.

~~~
throwaway13411
Evernote web clipper

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digital_voodoo
This has been and still is one of my main quests, too.

I have tried almost everything: Evernote, OneNote, Google Kepp, lastly Wenote
(Android), Dokuwiki, etc.

Currently I'm jumping between Notion and Telegram (saved messages).

I'd be more than interested if something 'better' emerges. Or, when I know
code, I'll probably start my own as a side-project.

~~~
throwaway13411
I really wanted to like Notion. For me it's completely unusable.

Notion feels like the opposite of the Unix tenet, "do one thing and do it
well".

I was somewhat excited when they released their web clipper recently but I
found out it doesn't allow to save snippets from a page (only allows to save
the url), which makes it useless for me.

Also the emojis are very offputting. Maybe it works well if the user wants to
organize a trip with friends but I want to use it as a research tool.

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agucova
Right now I'm experimenting with the sheets functionality in Notion, mainly
for book and web quotes in my case, but there is a lot of things I don't like.
The mobile app is sluggish, and the display options are not ideal for this
usage. I think it would be awesome if it would have an API I could work with.

~~~
agucova
I realize this is not at all optimal for sharing, and I've played with some
static site generators for this (but it's way too much work)!

I think a webapp for this would be simply awesome. (Sharing quotes and text
snippets through collections).

I'd love to know if someone has another suggestion

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turadg
I've wanted something like this too, mostly for learning and food for thought.

Memo tried to carve out a niche ("Facebook is for photos. Twitter for
discussing sports and Donald Trump. Memo is for learning.")
([https://web.archive.org/web/20161021001811/http://memoapp.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161021001811/http://memoapp.co/home))
but they ultimately threw in the towel.
([http://memoapp.co/](http://memoapp.co/))

I doubt there's going to be a successful new product for this because
Pinterest and Twitter cover the use cases pretty well and are hotter media (à
la McLuhan). Images are mostly a superset of text use cases. You can always
put great text into an image, and doing so gives is more context and emotional
color.

Also funny, if you search Hacker News for "pinterest text" you get this Ask HN
and a Show HN from six years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5558714)
So it looks like QuoteRed also tried and gave up.

Maybe an open source app would work because it wouldn't need much of a
sustainability model, just a few passionate dogfooding developers.

~~~
throwaway13411

      Images are mostly a superset of text use cases. You can always put great text into an image, and doing so gives is more context and emotional color.
    

I disagree, it should be optimized for high density text-only content.

HN attracts the kind of people it attracts because of its simplistic design,
no images and focus on content.

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vivianti
Shameless plug: I am building something that is still WIP and will have
something similar to what you described.

Here's the link if you'd like to give it a try:
[https://frackxn.com](https://frackxn.com)

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throwaway13411
There was also a service where you could enter your collection of
quotes/snippets and it would send you an email daily with a random quote.

Anyone remember what it was called?

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mcgrath_sh
Outside the box thought: why not make a private subreddit? With RES/old reddit
you see the titles and then can expand the text. Issue here would be
searching.

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throwaway13411
If anyone wants to chat about this, send me an email.

I've been thinking about it for a long time and have several ideas and
opinions.

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asselinpaul
[https://www.are.na/](https://www.are.na/) should be a good fit

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thebirdpeng
Hey Throwaway, can we talk? I might be working on something you can use! My
email is TheBirdPeng@gmail.com :)

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throwaway13411
Sent you a mail

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DoreenMichele
You might be able to arrange something satisfactory with Blogspot using either
Emporio or Notable as your theme.

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boldslogan
twitter, and then copy paste your quotes? and inside the tweet link to the
full context?

