Adding notes to saved stories.

idea
#1

Hi,

I’m not sure how feasible or how much work this would be, but would it be possible to add the ability to add notes to saved stories? Sometimes I save stories that have a specific thing(s) that I would like to remember about it when I come back to it later. Right now I kind of hack this feature using the tags, but it can get unwieldy if the note is long. If the notes could also be searchable that would be amazing.

Again, not sure how feasible or how much work this would be, but it would be really handy for some use cases I think.

Thanks.

-rattasak

4 Likes
#2

Searchable saved stories already exists and it works even by tag. Only one tag at a time though.

So you want the share story feature but in a private mode. It would be possible to add a note field for saved stories. I can’t imagine it would be all that difficult. The UI would get a little ugly though.

#3

Yep! I pretty often will add technical articles to my saved stories list and it’d be really handy to have a note’s field that I fill in with reminders about certain topics mentioned in the article to research more in depth, etc. I personally wouldn’t mind if the UI for this was cumbersome, but I would definitely understand if it’s something you wouldn’t want to add if it would negatively impact the UI for the rest of the Newsblur users. 

About the searching part. Love the search feature in Newsblur especially since I
have a lot of saved stories. I was more referencing if it would be reasonably easy
to add searching of the note text if a note field does get implemented. If that would
be too much work on top of adding a note field by itself I would understand
(especially since I’m not sure how much in demand this feature would 
be for other Newsblur users – though I would definitely use the heck out of it).

In any case, thanks for following up on this Samuel. :slight_smile:

#4

i wonder if it makes any sense whatsoever to have the ability to “nest” tags.

bear with me, this is actually relevant :slight_smile:

like, if i wanted to tag something as “art” and “photography”, and another thing as “art” and “painting”, and yet another thing as “art” and “music”, currently this is what my tags list would look like:

* art
* photography
* painting
* music
* tagX
* tagY
* tagZ

with many categories and sub-categories, this could get very cluttered. but what if i want to manage that clutter? maybe there can be a kind of tag syntax that can support or generate a kind of tag hierarchy. perhaps a slash, like so: “art/photography”, “art/painting”, “art/music”. multiple slashes would denote further hierarchy levels, e.g. “art/music/trip hop”, “art/music/RJD2”.  and the resulting list would look more like:

* art
 |___ photography
 |___ painting
 |___ music
        |____ trip hop
        |____ RJD2
* tagX
* tagY
* tagZ

to steer back to the original topic: with that framework in place, it might allow for rattasak to cleverly tag his stories (because tags can be complete sentences) without polluting or cluttering up his tag list. something like:
“random/this is a great explanation of how a car differential works”
“coding/what are lambda functions”
“work-related/save this to show my manager”

this seems like it could be easier than adding another text field to the story saving UI, and spare users the confusion of differentiating between saved story tags and notes (as well as any accompanying changes to the search infrastructure). all the while, rattasak’s tagging strategy wouldn’t carry quite the clutter cost that it does now.  

this may very well be a half-cocked idea, from either (or both) of your perspectives, i’m just thinking out loud.

#5

That sounds like a good idea as well. My use cases are usually either things like you posted (e.g. “machine.learning/find.more.info.about.algorithm.x.referenced.here” or highlighting key portions of the article. Ideally, it’d be nice to be able to cut/paste the small portions in the article that stand out and intersperse with my thoughts into the notes field (which is what I do on my pinboard.in account), but I agree that might add UI confusion for users who don’t care about that use case. The nested tags idea is definitely interesting too! (: Especially since I’m not sure how the UI for a notes field would work (text box at bottom of story entry?) 

#6

Yeah, highlighting excerpts sounds great. I would love to build this but it won’t be anytime soon unfortunately. I am planning on traveling at some point and this is one of those features I’d love to build while out in the world. Seems perfect time to integrate this use case. 

I liked this thread so much I cleaned up NewsBlur’s github issues profile to make a new style of public facing feature requests. See https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/issues/722 for the first one.

1 Like
#7

Sounds great Samuel! Thanks for being open to this idea. I appreciate it (: