Wouldn’t it be perfect if we could highlight just the snippets of an article we wanted and then harvest them all in one go, ready to slot into a WorkFlowy outline? Less work.  Less fuss.

I think WorkFlowy is more about doing and less about hoarding. So we’re going to look at how the brilliant Highly Highlighter platform hits that sweet spot – helping to curate incoming text and keeping clutter to a minimum.

Highly Highlighter

I’ve played around with a ton of web highlighters, and Highly Highlighter stood out for me. You’ll find them on Chrome, Safari and iOS. Firefox is to follow soon.

What Highly Highlighter allows you to do is highlight snippets of text on whatever web page you visit. They have a whole sharing thingumy doodah going… but for our purposes here, I’m most interested in Highly’s ability to group all of your highlights from any web page on one interface for easy copying over to WorkFlowy. This is Highly in action in Chrome (desktop):

1. Activate Highly highlighter: click on the “!” icon or use the Shift+! keyboard shortcut.
2. Highlight… highlight… highlight (all of these snippets are saved in your Highly feed).
3. Click on the Summary button in the Highly toolbar.

You could now go ahead and manually copy all of your highlights for that particular web page… but I like to clean things up a bit before copying: Notice how there is a tiny red superscript number at the end of each highlight? It’s one of Highly’s features you’ll have to look into… but what it means is that they will get copied over to, say, WorkFlowy, along with my selected snippets of text. Also, I’d like to get rid of some of the extra metadata below the title while I’m at it. This is how…

Cleaning things up with Stylish

I’ve created a little Stylish style especially for Highly Highlighter, which you can add to the Stylish extension. It takes us from this (you’ll skip this part with the style activated):

… to this (you’ll notice a page adjustment too!):

So that we can copy everything tidily, like so:

… and paste into WorkFlowy thusly:

Just the text you want. No more, no less.

Wikipedia: clean up now instead of later

You’ll have noticed that Wikipedia often has a lot of footnote reference links peppered throughout an article, which might need to be cleaned up some once you’ve pasted elsewhere (… maybe WorkFlowy?). Since Wikipedia cannot be avoided for the average web-goer, I’ve come up with something that you’re gonna wanna kiss me for: In the same way that I hid some extras from the Highly Highlighter summary overlay, I’ve created a Stylish style for Wikipedia, which hides those superscript footnote reference links (and darkens all other embedded links too), making for crisper, cleaner copy-pasting… and/ or easier-on-the-eye reading. And… when highlighting with Highly, these reference links don’t show up in your highlights summary. 

So instead of getting this:

… we get this:

… which makes a real, practical difference when copying anything from Wikipedia – whether via Highly Highlighter or straight up.

The circle of life – linking back to the source

Here’s (one of) the cherries on top with Highly Highlighter: You get to copy a custom share link which takes you back to a summary of highlights of any page where you marked your territory:

So you get to pop the the excerpts you want into WorkFlowy (or wherever), plus you get the added advantage of being able to navigate back to those specific excerpts on the original site. This can be done in one of 2 ways: After following the share link…

1. You can click on any highlight snippet within the Summary overlay or…
2. You can fast track to different highlights within the context of the actual site via the “place markers” on the Highly toolbar at the foot of the page:

Your turn

I’m sure you’ve got something to share. Please tell us about how you curate incoming text or how you get anything into WorkFlowy more easily than you did when you were a rookie.

---

Get EXCLUSIVE bite-sized  WorkFlowy  updates: tips, tricks & news about FREE online workshops with Frank Degenaar. Sign up here.