Store, Organize & Share Information With Shelfster

Irrespective of the domain you work, there’s so much information available on the internet that might benefit you — a lot. After a certain point, you might find the bookmarks you’ve created to be rather stale and useless. If you’re like me, there’s a very good chance you might forget why you’ve even bookmarked a page after a few days.

Making comments, taking notes and annotating content has never been easier. There are quiet a few apps doing a stellar job in archiving all your snippets of information in the cloud for anywhere access. One among them is Shelfster. Read on to see how it can help you collect, edit, organize and publish all sorts of information.

Overview

Shelfster assists you in meaningfully organizing snippets of information by offering you easy to use tools, supported by an integrated platform. Shelfster offers a great set of apps — both desktop and mobile — to make the task of capturing information from any environment quick and simple. You can see all the apps available in the Downloads section of their webpage.

The Shelfster service and all its apps — including the pretty slick iPhone app — are available completely free of charge. However, you’ll need to go through a simple sign up process to start accumulating all your snippets.

Getting Started

Getting started with Shelfster begins by selecting a tool of your choice — the bookmarklet or the desktop app. Shelfster’s Desktop app allows you to quickly gather your ideas and information from the web or from documents on your computer in cleverly designed snippets. These snippets are organized with specific tags and are stored in your online account. They can also be published on popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and WordPress, isntantly.

The Shelfster bookmarklet works more or less the same way as the desktop app and is ideal if you are behind a corporate firewall that restricts user installations. With the bookmarklet, all your snippets can be sent directly from your browser without switching to Shelfster’s online platform. The bookmarklet works an all modern web browsers and no installation is required!

Working with the Desktop App

While the Shelfster web app and homepage are gorgeously designed, the desktop app isn’t. After a quick installation, a desktop assistant that allows you to clip and crop snippets shows up just above the clock. Considering other snippet tools that have fat apps which commonly hog RAM (I’m looking at you Evernote), the Shelfster desktop app runs without making a peep!

Found an interesting article and looking to quote a paragraph or two in your paper? Select the text on the page and click Clip in the desktop assistant. The entire text you’ve copied, complete with the original formatting, will pop up in the desktop app. The snippet is automatically given a name but if you want you can change it. Add as many tags as you want to make the snippet easier to find later.

Jot down your thoughts by selecting the notes tab. Since only the text from the page is taken, if you wanted to know the source, you can do so by visiting the source tab that displays the original link. And, if you’re planning on sharing the snippet, you’ll need to make it public. Make sure you’ve added the login credentials of the social networks in the web app beforehand.

The Crop tool works perfectly for saving images you’ve found. Once you select Crop, it pretty much works like a typical image capturing tool. A rectangular window highlights the section of the page where the mouse is pointing and you’re able to move it around the screen by clicking and dragging. More screen real estate can be covered by resizing the capture window and by moving the mouse to its corners. Once you’re satisfied with the selection, hit enter and the desktop app will pop up with the image. Follow the same steps mentioned above to organize the snippet.

Using the Bookmarklet

Drag and drop the Shelfster bookmarklet on the Bookmarks toolbar and click it to initiate the snippet creation process. Creating a snippet from the bookmarklet menu works the same way it does on the desktop app, plus there’s an option to add the web page to your bookmarks. Strangely, the option to crop an image was missing!

Accessing the Snippets

Shelfster’s web app acts as the mothership that stores all your snippets as and when they’re created. All tags, notes and comments you’ve added are available exactly the way you created them.

After a while, if you have hundreds of snippets stored in the app and weren’t able to narrow it down the conventional way, Advanced Filters will come to your rescue. True to its name, you can filter snippets using advanced filters based on category, fields, date of creation, type, visibility and more.

Sharing & Community

Shelfster has an active community that shares lots of useful snippets in the public domain for everyone’s benefit. To make one of your own snippets available to the entire community, toggle its status to Public rather than Private. You can sift through all the snippets shared by the community with the extremely useful Advanced Filters.

Final Thoughts

Shelfster is a thoughtfully designed app and could be a worthy competitor to Evernote. While Shelfster doesn’t look as pretty as Evernote on the desktop, it isn’t a resource hog either. Shelfster’s desktop app runs on a tiny footprint and is quiet resourceful. The absence of a Mac app is a hefty downside but the bookmarklet works just fine on all Mac compatible browsers. Shelfster is a great choice for those looking for a light-weight yet powerful app to organize and share information. Take it for a spin!

Share Your Thoughts!

Do you use a snippet organizer yourself? Is Shelfster a better alternative to Evernote?