How to archive everything you read online

A relatively easy guide

For years I’d occasionally make myself crazy trying to find something online that I’d read before. Google is great, but when you know you’ve had an article on your screen some time ago that makes exactly the point you want to make and it’s turning up nonsense you want to pull your hair out. What if you could save the text of everything you read in a way that makes it searchable later? Here’s the system I’ve put together to do just that. It’s a bunch of steps to set up, but once it’s working it’s easy to save each article.

1. If you haven’t already got one, sign up for a Pocket account. The reason we want pocket is that it’s super easy to save articles to it. You’ve got extensions for all major browsers, bookmarklets for your mobile devices, support built into Twitter clients and feed readers, you name it. The point of this system is to make it easy to get things in.
2. You almost certainly already have an Evernote account, but if not sign up for one of those too. It’s debatable whether putting your whole life into Evernote is a good idea, but for this it’s perfect: it will store whatever you throw at it in an easily searchable format. There’s even a plugin that’ll show you relevant results from your Evernote archive alongside your Google search results.
3. Now we need some internet glue to connect these things. Of course IFTTT is going to come into play; but just creating a trigger to create an item in Evernote when you add something to Pocket will result in an excerpt. Ick! We want full text. Here’s how to do it. First you need to remove the password protection on your Pocket account’s RSS feed. Head here and click “turn off RSS feed protection.” (Be warned: this makes the contents of your Pocket account accessible to snoops.)
4. Now head over to the handy dandy Full Text RSS Feed Builder. You’re going to enter this: http://getpocket.com/users/USERNAME/feed/all (of course put your pocket username in place of “USERNAME”). This’ll give you another URL. Hang on, we’re almost done!
5. Now head over to IFTTT and use this recipe that I created just for you. You can customize it to save to a specific Evernote notebook, or add whatever tags you want. I use the default notebook.

And that’s it. The setup is complicated, but once the system is in place it’s easy to toss everything into it, which is the point. The only complication is that when you’re in Pocket you’ve got items that you saved to read later and items that you’ve already read. Pocket makes it easy to check off the items you’re done with, so that’s not a huge problem for me.