Scrapbook is a Firefox extension which allows you to capture portions of websites or the entire website and store it locally on your machine, where you can then search the contents, make notes on them, and organize them as you see fit. It’s free and is good at what it does.

I’ll confess that I don’t really buy the use of the browser as a scrap booking tool. I’m doing similar things using Devonthink Pro though (capturing the full contents of websites along with snippets from them) as a knowledgebase tool so I understand where this is coming from conceptually. It just seems to me that lacking some of the intelligent filtering that Devonthink provides this isn’t nearly as useful. Still, many folks seem to use and like it. Maybe you’ll become one of them.

Check out this handy web-based .htaccess generator. Can’t remember how to add that cgi handler, or how to match against a local passwd for authentication? This is the tool for you. Fill out the form, submit, and it will provide you with the text to tuck into your .htaccess file. Drop that into the directory and you’re good to go.

I’ve posted about Jotspot several times, and at one point wondered how they’d actually make it with a for-pay wiki play when there are plenty of free alternatives out there. Partner with the big boys seems to be the answer – ebay began testing the use of a wiki for their customers and Jot is the vendor who’s providing their wiki engine. Kudos to the Jot folks – I love their tech, used it quite a bit when I was at Skidmore, and am happy to see them getting commercial recognition for their excellent tools.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a trick that enabled you to get in on the yahoo email beta. A little history is on order here. Several years ago a company called Oddpost began offering webmail accounts with a really slick interface. It was IE only though, and after a bit Yahoo snapped them up and indicated they would enhance the client and make it cross browser compatible. At least two years have passed since then. For whatever reason Yahoo seems to be struggling with this, and in the interim gmail came out and pretty much defined what a web 2.0 mail interface ought to look like. This is the core of Yahoo’s problem now, because their new interface suffers in comparion. Much like Yahoo’s homepage, the webmail client is too cluttered with crap, and what’s worse is that it’s an ajax app so it streams this crap in piecemeal and this can literally freeze the browser or make it very unresponsive while it pulls the elements that make up the interface down.

Long story short, after about a month and a half with the beta I’ve switched back. It’s possible that Yahoo can address some of these problems – for example, they might not have enough bandwith/servers allocated to the beta which could be causing the slow streaming in of the data and the browser sluggishness – but even if they address that, it doesn’t address their clumsy and cluttered user interface. Given the evolution of their homepage it seems less likely they’ll effectively address this (they seem to subscribe to the ‘more is better’ school of design at a time when google and many web 2.0 companies (37 signals, del.icio.us, digg, to name just a few examples) are demonstrating that the opposite is true.

Still, I’ll keep an open mind and try it again when they go live with it for all customers, or announce another round of beta testing, to see if it’s improved to the point of actually being usable.