Two Recent Odes to Evernote

Posted on April 29th, 2013

Two articles on Evernote have crossed my desk, and they're worth sharing.

The ever-inspiring Sacha Chua details how she uses Evernote in conjunction with sketchnotes, and how Evernote's OCR helps when she wants to find something later. It even got her to change from cursive note-taking within the sketchnotes to printing to make the OCR more accurate. I don't have the graphical creative gene, so I won't be making sketchnotes anytime soon, but it does show how useful Evernote can be after you've stored your notes. (I've been more interested in using other software to do OCR (like Prizmo on my iPhone) and then store in Evernote, but maybe this is the nudge I need to rely on Evernote's OCR more).

Last month, Whitson Gordon wrote at length about how he was using Evernote wrong, and how he uses it for almost everything. I was skeptical of the Web Clipper, but recently using it to catalog online aggregators has shown me the light. I needed the nudges of 1) creating many notebooks instead of settling with a couple, and 2) related notes when searching Google, which have reminded from time to time what I have stored in Evernote.

This Site's Atom Feed

Posted on April 4th, 2013


To celebrate, so that it's discoverable by your aggregator of choice if you just add the site's URL, I've added the following to my Postachio site's template in between the tags.


To further celebrate, I've subscribed. Are you subscribed to your own site's RSS/Atom feed?

Importing Findings into Evernote: Research Notes

Posted on April 2nd, 2013

This is only in the idea stage, and these are my notes so far. There is no working code yet.

I use Findings to clip memorable passages from web-based articles. For a while, their iOS bookmarklet would not work, but after a few months hiatus, revisiting their tools page shows that they have instructions specific to iOS. The newer bookmarklet works like a charm on my iPhone and iPad mini, where I do the bulk of my reading. (Mostly in Instapaper, but I go to the web version to clip things if something stands out.)

I'd like to get all my Findings into Evernote. I don't sense that Findings has much of an export function, though I did a quick search to find they have a semi-documented API with a Python client. Supposedly if I were to visit a certain URL (listed in the documentation), I could get some API keys, though this seems not to work. I have a question about that on their forum.

In the meantime, someone has created a recipe on IFTTT to feed one's Findings RSS feed into an Evernote notebook, and that seems to be working fine for me. This will not import past Findings, nor will it contain the original URL of the item (which is not contained in the RSS feed).

If you're basing your own IFTTT recipe off the one linked above, be sure to put in your username in the RSS feed and update the notebook where you want findings to land in.

Why not just use Evernote to clip articles? I like the social and discovery parts of Findings, even if only a few people use it at this writing. I'd like to sharing my Findings to highlight a portion of a text, combining it with the SavePublishing bookmarklet, which identifies all the sentences that will fit inside 140 characters (and a link to the original).

Taking Notes About Note-Taking Software

Posted on March 26th, 2013

If there's a note-taking tool, in that tool is a note about that tool. In Evernote's case, I have a separate notebook dedicated to documenting the quirks of the software, and keep track of known issues with links to their support request in the Evernote forums. The nice thing about Postach.io is that you assign an entire notebook to the blog, and when you tag a note as 'published', only then does it go to your Postach.io blog. So I'll use my "Evernote" notebook as both my blog on the subject and some annoyances (which I'm all about getting out of my head to see how ridiculous they might be) and ideas that I can keep private until the time comes.

Didn't I see a privacy policy on the site somewhere? Theoretically Postach.io has access to everything in my Evernote? Does Evernote have per-notebook authorization? Some questions to hang in the air while I research them myself.

There, I moved the note I had about Evernote that was in my main Evernote notebook to my Evernote notebook titled "Evernote". Phew!

Welcome to my Evernote Blog!

Posted on March 25th, 2013

Now that Postach.io is in public beta, I can, in the true spirit of trying out a new tool, use that tool to talk about the tool itself! I'm going to use my account here to talk about about my discoveries relating to the underlying tool, Evernote. This year, I made a promise to myself that I would use the online-based note-taking and -storage tool more often, and settled on Evernote after reading Alexandra Samuel's book on Evernote during the holidays. (She also has tips for using Evernote for each month of the year.)

I'm slowly migrating everything from Simplenote, including my long list of command lines I refuse to remember and notes from the serial novel The Silent History, the latter I hope to publish as a wiki so that fellow readers can fill in some of the blanks.

Follow along with my joys and frustrations of using Evernote! I regularly use the iPad, iPhone, and Mac versions of the software, and whenever Evernote comes out with another official app that uses themselves as a backend, and I'm always on the lookout for interesting ways to integrate it with something else.