grasp VS Memacs

There is an extension called Grasp which acts as a web clipper, you highlight the relevant part & add a tag. It's pretty great. But it only appends to a file. https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html witch is another small example of automation to a certain extent.

I use grasp to capture links from the browser. It also captures any text you have selected on the page and you can add tags and a description.

I'm not using browser bookmarks anymore, instead I am just using plaintext files (org-mode in my case). When I want to make a bookmark I use grasp [0] to simply capture in in the 'links.org' file, possibly with some notes/selected text and tags. Now and then I would skim through this file, refile the most important/interesting things to other files, and put the rest into 'later.org' (things I might never look at again :) ). The upside is that bookmarks become alive this way, you can easily edit them, add more context, interlink, etc.

I also mirror saved items from other services (e.g. reddit/HN/twitter/instapaper) as plaintext org-mode files, via orger [1].

Then, all of this feeds into Promensia [0] [1], a tool I wrote that serves as a web browsing copilot and surfaces my bookmarks (or any relevant links, really) when I'm browsing.

That way I don't need to worry about spending too much time processing bookmarks and that I'd never read them, I can just read the most interesting stuff and the rest is searchable (so I use it as a knowledge base/personal search engine), and surfaces in my browser via Promnesia, so I can find out if I have some relevant information in my knowledge base without actively searching. I don't need to suffer from vendor lock-in (even if the service/tool is open, migration is always painful), I can just add another adapter to my system and feed it into Promnesia/Orger.

[0] https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp#readme

[1] https://beepb00p.xyz/orger.html

[2] https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23668507

In tech terms, behind the scene, yes is complex, but in practical terms just see https://github.com/karlicoss/grasp/ :-)

Grasp (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasp and https://beepb00p.xyz/grasp.html for the system/python listener) and Promnesia (https://beepb00p.xyz/promnesia.html) help me "import" quick bookmarks to org-mode (I can't use org-protocol with firejail, at least I have to tweak firejail and I never tried to do so). They demand a small effort (perhaps a quick python venv somewhere in the home to remain self-contained) but they are helpful.

for reading, I'm currently trying to set up elfeed and come sort of capture like grasp. My idea is to use org-mode to also log those things (kinda) effortless.

Might look into some of the tools like novoids Memacs. Notion here is to build tools that push feeds, history data, into Emacs. Using org in your use case with the Khoj tool, could be the "glue" you need to tie it all together. https://github.com/novoid/Memacs#readme.

See the whitepaper, called "What really happened on September 15th 2008? Getting The Most from Your Personal Information with Memacs"[2].

This project is now a little bit dead, but the concept of private data fusion was fantastic, and transformed my view of calendars.

Agree that calendars are a little underused in that way, and would love to see more work towards that private calendar data usage.

[1]: https://github.com/novoid/Memacs

Another method is used via Memacs filename module: it generates a text file with all files that start with a date- or time-stamp. This file can then be used for all sorts of workflows for retrieving files. For example, this is how I include images in my blog using lazyblorg and its "Smart tsfile Image File Search".

Renaming files isn't an issue any more once you've started using file file referencing methods that are not prone to changed folder paths (alternative method) or even the basic file name (by using the unchanged first part of the file name as long as it is unique among all indexed files). This way, I really don't care about broken links any more because I don´t get them. But you don't get that freedom with most PIM tools except mine, I'm afraid.

Yes. AFAIK, it is exactly how Karl Voit uses his file tags. And a lot more: https://github.com/novoid/Memacs

Memacs - a framework for integrating various data sources into Org-mode

https://github.com/novoid/Memacs sounds like it might be somewhat related to your goal of making a timeline of your activity.

Back to the original question. In order to get as much content as possible into a common format to be displayed in a common temporal view, I've created a framework that consists of some general functionality and a set of modules that deal with different input sources and formats. This project is called Memacs. You can also read a whitepaper about it.

My observation in the last few years here seem to indicate that - not many Emacs users are necessarily into Org mode and this kind of data curation, or atleast that few have very elaborate setups that they have shared. Here's some serious inspiration: https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html, and AFAIK the most comprehensive example out there. For example, there's the Promnesia package by the same author (https://github.com/karlicoss/promnesia) which I used for awhile and its cool ! There's also Karl Voit's Memacs https://github.com/novoid/Memacs/ (which appears mentioned in the previous link).