Ask HN: Pinterest for Text?

[throwaway13411]

I keep text snippets saved from webpages (thousands of them) and would like to present this collection online.

I haven'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.

I was thinking that this description is close to a blog but I'd like it to be optimized for displaying a lot of different snippets (as in Pinterest and giving the choice to the user to "peruse" through the entries quickly) but clicking on an entry should result in expanding into full content (again like Pinterest).

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's quote page is too simple and doesn't offer the "read more" feature: http://worrydream.com/quotes/

Anyone has seen anything out there that matches my needs? I don't mind paid services.

[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

[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/

[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.

[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/).

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

[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.

[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...

[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

[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.

[thebirdpeng]

Hey Voodoo, can I talk to you about what you're looking for? I might be working on something you can use! My email is [e-mail] :)

[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

[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...) but they ultimately threw in the towel. (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 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.

[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

[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?

[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.

[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.

[asselinpaul]

https://www.are.na/ should be a good fit

[thebirdpeng]

Hey Throwaway, can we talk? I might be working on something you can use! My email is [e-mail] :)

[throwaway13411]

Sent you a mail

[DoreenMichele]

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

[boldslogan]

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