I’ve tried out a lot of web clippers to save articles and things I come across on the Web, everything from Readwise to Pocket to Memex.

I’ve now settled on Obsidian Webclipper, here are my thoughts on it:

  • Obsidian’s web clipper is supported by basically all browsers, and also has an iOS extension!

    all the supported browsers

  • Natively parses and saves webpages to Markdown files. This allows everything to remain local and accessible, without having to worry about broken links/missing webpages in the future!

  • The only downside of this is that you lose site-specific formatting, e.g. same website below:

    • The UI/UX of a website contributes a lot to the intended message and nuance of an article, stripping everything away into a flat Markdown file loses a lot of that.

    • This is my only gripe with the clipper though!

  • Obsidian web clipper natively allows you to save highlights from webpages, making it super easy to take notes while reading.

  • Also, it supports custom templates which allow you to customise how your notes are saved. My setup looks something like below

    • Here’s the code you can copy and paste into web clipper’s settings to replicate my setup:

      ## Thoughts:
      - **[[{{time|date:"YYYY-MM-DD"}}|{{time|date:"ddd, MMM DD, YY"}}]] at {{time|date:"h:mm a"}}:**
          - <% tp.file.cursor() %>
      
      ## Highlights:
      
      {{highlights|template:"> ${text}\n- <% tp.file.cursor() %>\n\n"|join:""}}
      
      ---
      # {{title}}
      
      {{content}}
      
  • Obsidian web clipper also deeply integrates with Obsidian for an all-in-one knowledge management setup. My tagging system works perfectly, as well as my note-linking and semantic connection workflows.

    polgar is my tag for everything that might potentially help my future kids

That’s about it, definitely recommend!