Worth A Look:
Quickbrowse

Sometimes it seems like I'm on a never-ending quest to find tools to help me keep up with the flood of online news. I've tried everything from email subscription services to screensavers that capture news Web pages, but somehow nothing seems to provide exactly what I'm looking for.

Worth A Look Worth A Look features reviews of search tools, books, newsletters, and other helpful resources for Web searchers. Worth A Look Archives

A new tool called Quickbrowse has gone a long way toward satisfying my needs, though.

Quickbrowse provides a deceptively simple service: feed it a list of URLs, and it combines them into a single "masterpage" in your browser window. Rather than clicking back and forth between your favorite news sites, you simply scroll down one long page.

All links from each individual page remain functional. Clicking on a link opens the new page in a separate window, which remains hidden behind the masterpage. Once you've scanned your masterpage and have finished clicking links, all of the stories you want to read are already open.

If you don't want a bunch of new browser windows to be opened, Quickbrowse gives you the option of creating a second masterpage combining pages from all of the links you clicked. This is my preferred option. The first masterpage provides an overview of the news, the second, all of the in-depth articles.

Another option simply creates a text-only file of all the pages you select. This is extremely handy if you do a lot of cut-and-pasting of article text. Quickbrowse even provides links to open this text-only file in either your word-processor or your browser window.

Quickbrowse copes easily with sites where URLs change each day, or with password protected pages. It can also handle sites that use frames.

You can create as many "collections" of URLs as you like, giving each a descriptive name. You can then bookmark these collections, or request email delivery of your masterpages a regular basis.

Best of all, Quickbrowse is free. I'm using it to track my favorite news sites every day. If you're still on your search for the holy grail of information overload managers, Quickbrowse is definitely is worth a look.

Quickbrowse:
http://www.quickbrowse.com/

— Chris Sherman

Thanks to Gary Price for the heads-up on Quickbrowse.

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