THERE ARE several ways to to create, arrange and store snippets of text from web pages, starting with Google Notebook, and some extensions for the Firefox browser. But on the web, simplicity is king, and that's where Citebite.com shines.

Web-based utilities and tools come and go, others are rendered obsolete by new ones with the changing of the seasons. The "web 2.0" ones often succumb to the "bells and whistles" craze. Yet, Citebite remains pure to the "KISS" philosophy of "Keep It Simple, S..."eriously.

The idea behind Citebite is simple: you want to lead your contacts or friends, or maybe even return yourself, to some particular quote on a web page, news story, blog, or, heaven forbid, even the INQUIRER. And you want the person doing the web browsing not to have to install anything. Citebite does it all for you creating a new URL for your "Cite".

One of its best design points is that you land straight in the quoted paragraph, even if it's in the middle or bottom of the text. It does this by copying the behaviour of an inserted "named anchor" at the start of the highlighted paragraph.

But perhaps the most useful "side effect" is using Citebite as a tool against dead web pages. When you create a highlight with Citebite, you obtain a new page with a URL like "http://pages.citebite.com/{code}". Well, that page - in case you didn't notice - is a mirror copy of the original content, with the highlight effect applied to the chosen paragraph, and hosted at Citebite's server, so by creating a Citebite you indirectly preserve the content from deletion or future disappearance at its original web server.

One whackypedia user explained his use of Citebite.com: "The Bangkok Post doesn't use stable URLs for news articles - articles only stay up for about a week before being deleted. The Internet archive does not store Bangkok Post articles. I and many other editors of Thailand-related articles therefore use(d) Citebite (which stores a copy of a web page on its servers) for article citations of the Bangkok Post."

Now the bad: a Firefox extension used to be available, but the links are now broken. However if you find hard enough you can still find it. Yet, version 0.03 will refuse to install on FF above version 2.0. It is still purely an artificial limitation and version check. Just by changing " Maxversion " from 2.0 to 3.0 on the file install.rdf made the FF extension work OK even in Firefox 3.0. There is also a Bookmarklet that can be used even with other browsers. [Update: the author has been notified of this and he says he'll upload our fixed version]

In Short
This scribbler uses Citebite. It's a good, old-fashioned web site that does one thing and does it well. It's been around for about one and half years, and the developer claims it's not going away anytime soon. When we found the site suddenly not working a week ago - it refused to create new Citebite URLs, yet old ones continued working fine - an old-fashioned e-mail to "support@" fixed the issue, replied to by no one else than the site creator. Definitely something not seen every day. µ