Surfulater - Saving web pages and Web Surfing Research Tool
 ... indispensable software for internet research and web information management

Often when I'm surfing the Internet I find information I want to keep. Adding sites to Favorites is of little use because the list so quickly get out of hand and it becomes near impossible to find things. A bigger problem still is when Web sites or specific pages disappear altogether and the information which was of interest to me is sadly no longer available.

Fortunately there are programs around to help me permanently retain the information I find while surfing. Many of these programs only save complete Web pages which often isn't what I want. Instead I prefer to select pertinent information from pages and save that. Also beware that saving pages with lots of images can use up lots of disk space. These program often work inside your browser, which can cause problems and ties you to a specific browser.

After trying many programs which save Web content my favorite by far is a new program named Surfulater (http://www.surfulater.com). Surfulater lets me save selected text and images from Web pages and also lets me save complete Web pages, so I have the best of both worlds. But that is just the beginning. It has a compehensive list of internet research features.

Unlike many other programs Surfulater lets me edit the information I capture while surfing using its built-in HTML editing capabilities. I can add my own notes which is great when I come back and need to jog my memory later on. Something else I find really useful is the ability to link articles together, enabling me to create a Web of related information. For example I can link an article about engines in one folder to an article about cars in another. And there is no limit to how many of these neat two way links I can add.

Surfulater articles are maintained in a tree much like you are used to in Windows Explorer. You can create any number of folders to hold articles and easily move or copy articles between folders. Interestingly you can have the same identical article in many folders at the same time, which solves a common problem where information often fits into multiple categories, and no one single category is the best. For example does an article about engines go in the engines folder or the car or boat folder! Surfulater lets me put it in all three.

Surfulater stores information in what it terms a Personal Knowledge Base. This works really well for me, as everything is stored in just two files which I can easily carry back and forth between my office and home on a USB drive. Some other programs I looked at used lots of files and I couldn't see how I could get the portability I wanted.

Surfulater has a full text search engine which quickly finds anything I want. It includes advanced search capabilities so I can search for "cat or dog or mouse" for example. Not something I use a lot, but an absolute must have capability.

Other things I like about Surfulater is it is uncluttered and easy to use, performs quickly, seems to have been well thought through with a focus on what users want and is small in size. There are a few things I'd like to see added but after looking at the Future Plans list and reading the Surfulater forums I can see these are in the pipeline.

In summary if you want to save information while surfing the net (and who
doesn't) then I suggest you give Surfulater a good try. You can download a Free Trial version from their Web site www.surfulater.com.

Here are some books that may help you in your web research.

• Internet Online Searching Pg 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
• Web Programming - HTML General Pg 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
• Web Site Design Pg 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
• Web Programming Pg 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22