If you've used Clipboard for any length of time, then you already know that our Web clipper is the most powerful tool in existence for saving parts of the Web. However, the clipper's ability to save whole pages has been a work in progress. Truth be told, we haven't always been happy with the quality of whole page clips ourselves.
That said, we've just released an update to the clipper that makes whole page clipping a nearly perfect process. If you want a whole page saved exactly as it looks at that moment, simply click on the "bookmark" button of the clipper. If, however, you are looking at a news article or a blog post, you may want just the core content of the page saved in a reading format that is easy on the eyes. To create a "reader" clip of a page, simply click on the "text" button of the clipper.
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That's the short version of what's new. The longer version follows below and describes more of the nuances of what has changed.
First, some backstory.
We previously tried two different methods for handling whole pages, both of which were flawed. The first approach was to use the exact same method that we used for extracting a part of a page. The problem with this approach is that it is slow when applied to an entire page and small imperfections tend to get amplified in the context of the whole page.
The second approach was to use a Web crawler on our servers to render the page to an image, effectively acting like a server-side screen grab. The problem with this approach was that we only gave you an image of the page (with no functioning links or embeds) and the image that we generated was the version of the page as seen by the general public. Thus, if you tried to save a copy of your Facebook feed, you'd end up with an image of the Facebook login page, which is hardly the desired result.
Our latest release addresses both of these issues. A whole page "bookmark" clip will now be a source level copy of the page (sans JavaScript) as it was at that moment you clipped it, and the extraction process is incredibly fast. You can clip almost any private page in this manner, even a bank statement, or a page that you've authenticated into (like the reddit clip above). This is a really powerful feature so please be careful and don't publish things that you shouldn't.
Our new reader mode is the next evolutionary step of text clipping. As before, you can still make small text clippings of a piece of text by selecting it and then launching the clipper. However, if you activate text clipping without any text selected, the clipper will make its best attempt at grabbing the core content of a page. You'll want to keep in mind that this process works best on blog and news sites, i.e., pages where there is a prominent blob of text relative to the entire page. Also, if you cancel the reader clip, the clipper will put you back into text clipping mode, allowing you to select a more specific section of text.
We think that these two new types of clips will give you a lot more utility than before and we hope that this translates to simplifying your life by reducing the number of tools that you need to get a job done. Moreover, we added these features after hearing form our avid users, so please keep sending us your thoughts and ideas.