eating cucumbers without permission...

I started using Slogger the other week, and it wasn’t long before its deficiencies started to grate. Slogger is designed to log everything or nothing, but what I needed was selective archiving. I needed an electronic archivist that would only save certain pages — just chapters at fanfiction.net, say; or stories at Slashdot, but not comment pages.

After a week spent stealingre-using code from other projects (I ♥ open source!), and an embarrassingly large number of hours reading XUL tutorials, I present Ark v0.1 for Firefox.

Ark uses selective filtering to pick which pages to archive. It’s much like the filtering from Adblock (which isn’t surprising, given that my original intention was to steal it from there), except in reverse. Add a pattern like “fanfiction.net/s/*/*/” and save everything that matches it.

It has full regular expression support, inasmuch as Firefox itself does. That means no atomic grouping, no lookbehind and no conditionals, but it’s enough for some added flexibility. Use some (?!html) lookahead fu to block pages with a .html extension, for example.

There’s an option to overwrite old files, rather than just saving another copy. (It occurs to me now that there should be an option for not saving at all, too. Uh, it’ll be in version 0.2, yeah, version 0.2…)

At the click of a button you can force save a page that doesn’t match the pattern list, with the option of adding it as a pattern then and there.

If you want to save copies of the occasional single page, ScrapBook is probably the best extension for you. It has fantastic features for highlighting or deleting parts of pages, plus inbuilt tools for archive management. If you want to save every page you visit, log your browser history, and notify services like StumbleUpon and Furl, then give Slogger a go. If you want selective archiving, like I did, consider trying Ark.