How Very Meta

I’ve been collecting my ethnographic data for about 10 weeks now.  I have to admit that I’m a bit behind… I have not looked at and analyzed every post on every blog I’m observing since the date I started observations.  Conveniently for me, those posts generally don’t disappear.

Part of the delay has been developing a workflow.  Because posts sometimes DO disappear, and so that I can do work if I happen to be offline (rare, but it has been known to happen), I am archiving the text of each blog post.  Straight up copy/paste doesn’t work – it doesn’t capture images or links.  Just viewing the source of the page doesn’t work – because it just gives you the framework of the page, not the post html itself.

My first tactic was to use the source viewer tab extension for Firefox and copy & paste from there into a local html file, which worked but I generally lost some formatting and getting it from there into my info management system – Journler* – was a multi-step process.  

And then, about two weeks ago, a very smart person on the Journler support boards reminded me that I could drag a URL straight from my browser onto the Journler icon on the dock to create a shortcut to the post (which will open in Journler’s built-in browser) from which I can also easily create a reasonable local text copy.

Obviously this is a MUCH better workflow, but it means I need to go back and re-do a bunch of stuff.

Could I have figured this out sooner?  Probably… but it’s not the end of the world and everything looks oh-so pretty and is oh-so easy to find & code now.

*It should be noted that I ADORE Journler.  I use it for EVERYTHING – task management, receipts, webpages I need to read, anytime I need to dump any kind of text that I need to find again later.  Highly recommended – but you have to be a person of superior intellect Mac user.