Google Notebook Offline Replacement

It took me a while, but now I have a very good and I hope future proof solution for keeping all my information that I gathered in the last few years. Below you’ll get a succinct account of what I had to do.

After I saved all my Google Notebook information as complete web pages (one webpage per notebook), I ended up with around 70 MB of HTML, CSS and images which were indexed by Copernic Desktop Search but I was still lacking the functionality that Google Notebook provided to me. So I downloaded:

• Autoit (for some small scripting that I needed)
• Tag2find (for all the tagging needs)
• TextMaker Viewer (for a fast open document format viewer)

I created a folder list using this small autoit script:

Dim $year , $month , $foldername
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script Start")
$year = 2004
While $year <= 2009
    $month = 01
    Do
        If $month < 10 then
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & "0" & $month
        Else
            $foldername = "C:\Test\" & $year & $month
        EndIf
        DirCreate ($foldername)
        $month = $month + 1
    Until $month = 13
    $year = $year + 1
WEnd
MsgBox(0, "Create Folders", "Script End")

The script is self explanatory. I used it in order to avoid manually create all the folders that I need from the month of 200401 to the month of 200912.

Then I used copy paste extensively between Firefox and OpenOffice and saved all the individual articles from Google Notebook as OpenOffice documents. The documents were saved in the folder corresponding to the month of their creation. Also in each folder is a document called bookmarks that contain all the bookmarked sites from that month. After I finished with Google Notebook I saved all my Scrapbook information in the same format.

Probably using Autoit someone could automate this step also. I preferred to do it manually because I wanted to see what I am going to keep going further. So far I spent close to 100 hours doing this and I ended up with almost 1.5 GB of articles (more than 4000 documents)

Now I am tagging each document with the appropriate tags using tag2find .  Probably at the rate that I am doing it is going to take me probably another month. After that I will have a complete tagged database of information which is portable, offline and backed up. Is good to know that the entire taxonomy from tag2find can be exported as an XML file and the actual files are in ODT format.

Now I am still using Scrapbook for capturing web pages that are of interest to me, but I will spend probably 2-3 hours each month moving information from Scrapbook to the offline repository that I created.