Highlight the Web 🖍

"Highlight" web content as you read it -- like you would when reading a high school textbook

An Alfred workflow that automatically generates notes and markdown links as you do research, so that you can easily track and trace content

Some examples:

• Hotkey to generate a markdown link for the current page, where the link title is the tab/document title
• Hotkey to generate a snippet with the selected text, followed by a source markdown link, where the link utilizes the new Text Fragment API to link exactly to where the text is on the page
• Hotkeys for either of those, but appending it to a running clipboard (ultimately resulting a list of markdown notes)

Why?

This workflow allows me to take notes in my wiki pretty seamlessly. When done researching, I'll dump the clipboard into a wiki page, and organize if I think I need to. This has the effect of letting me take notes on topics I'm researching that would otherwise be too cumbersome to do.

But I do more than just copy -- I also include a source link at the end of each copied note, so that I can remember where I read something. Those links are much more useful if they point right to the text on the page. Luckily, the Text Fragment spec was implemented by Chrome recently, so I leverage that.

Now, I can even more easily capture memories when researching, and go exactly to where the memory came from. For me, that's been incredibly powerful.

The Text Fragment functionality

To generate the text fragment (from an AppleScript), I had to fork a Google repo that had the JavaScript necessary to generate a text fragment link in a robust way. See that fork for more details 😀

I used to do this logic on my own, but the logic ends up being incredibly complex. So Google's code worked a bit better 😄