Sonny Software

I do a great deal of research with online newspapers, so I save a lot of Internet sources to Bookends via the Bookends Browser. In general it works fine, but there are two "quality of life" improvements that would be really nice - not sure how big an audience there would be for these.

1. A way to toggle ez proxy from within the browser window or an ez proxy "whitelist". I have my university ez proxy set up in Bookends Preferences, and as a result everything is routed through it, showing the error interstitial. It just adds a bit more time and a click but it would be nice if there was a way to suspend ez proxy for specific websites.

2. A lot of newspaper websites have a ton of ads and other content and, worse, several of the West African ones I consult have automatically playing music, radio, etc. This really slows down the browser view and make the saved web archives unwieldy. I wonder if there could be a way to add an Instapaper-like view, or maybe save as PDF instead of webarchive? From what I can tell, Zotero (which was arguably built for this kind of thing) strips out a lot of the non-text elements, which makes it a bit easier to use.

I'm not sure about #1, but for #2 saving the HTML as a PDF is an interesting thought. I'd have to look into that.

Jon
Sonny Software

I think I can save the web page as a PDF instead of a webarchive, but any ads will still be there, and links will be live (i.e. clicking on an ad would take you to the corresponding web page). So unless I'm missing something, I don't see any advantage to a PDF vs a webarchive.

Jon
Sonny Software

Thanks for looking into this Jon. I think the main advantage would be that sound and such would not play in PDF (I think). This might be an unusual case but take this webpage for example: http://freedomnewspaper.com. Web archives in Bookends play the embedded music and, perhaps unrelated, looking at a webarchive from this site routinely crashes Bookends.