Upgrade StorageFeature request: Saving webpages via the Magic Wand
Hi Zoteroites! I would like to request a feature addition to Zotero. I would find it very valuable to be able to save a webpage + its snapshot directly through the Magic Wand.
Saving and opening websites in Zotero through the Zotero Connector is very nice, but I find it somewhat annoying to use -- I am frequently pasting in DOIs / ISBNs into the Magic Wand in Zotero to add them, but if I want to add a webpage I have to have the Zotero connector installed, visit the webpage in my browser, add it to my Zotero library through the connector, then go back over to Zotero and change or update all the metadata I want to add/tweak/etc. Don't get me wrong, I love that I'm able to do this, and I love that I'm able to open webpages saved this way directly in Zotero -- but I really feel that the standalone desktop application should have this functionality built in.
As I understand it, Zotero is a modified version of Firefox, so I think it should have a browser engine in there with which it can visit + snapshot the page? It certainly has something capable of rendering the snapshotted pages. So though I'm sure it would be a decent amount of work, I think adding support for webpages to the Magic Wand would be technologically possible to do. And so long as a URL is not a DOI, it can be treated as a webpage and accessed + snapshotted, I think.
Anyway, I thought I would mention this here as these forums are the place for suggestions, AFAIK. I'm interested to know what the Zotero developers / community would think about this. And congratulations to the team on the 9.0 release.
Saving and opening websites in Zotero through the Zotero Connector is very nice, but I find it somewhat annoying to use -- I am frequently pasting in DOIs / ISBNs into the Magic Wand in Zotero to add them, but if I want to add a webpage I have to have the Zotero connector installed, visit the webpage in my browser, add it to my Zotero library through the connector, then go back over to Zotero and change or update all the metadata I want to add/tweak/etc. Don't get me wrong, I love that I'm able to do this, and I love that I'm able to open webpages saved this way directly in Zotero -- but I really feel that the standalone desktop application should have this functionality built in.
As I understand it, Zotero is a modified version of Firefox, so I think it should have a browser engine in there with which it can visit + snapshot the page? It certainly has something capable of rendering the snapshotted pages. So though I'm sure it would be a decent amount of work, I think adding support for webpages to the Magic Wand would be technologically possible to do. And so long as a URL is not a DOI, it can be treated as a webpage and accessed + snapshotted, I think.
Anyway, I thought I would mention this here as these forums are the place for suggestions, AFAIK. I'm interested to know what the Zotero developers / community would think about this. And congratulations to the team on the 9.0 release.
This is even more so the case now with many websites putting up captchas and other anti-bot tools: frequently, that's what capture by URL would catch instead of the actual webpage.