My Evernote blogging notebook.

I've been an Evernote user for a long time. Occasionally I pay them money for their premium version which I don't use. But I might someday. Like today. Maybe. Or maybe tomorrow.

This is not an endorsement of Evernote. I have problems with it and writing about it has brought thos problems into sharp relief. So much so that I am going to spend some time looking into a way to replace it.

But first the good:

Evernote's concept is great. It makes it easy to collect and organize interesting web content in the cloud. Instead of setting (and forgetting) a bookmark, I can copy a whole web page or a part of one. What I've bookmarked might be changed or might disappear, but what I've copied is forever. And it's better because there's no way to search bookmarks. Evernote has search tools for its web interface and tools that integrate with Google's search.

So, in theory, I can copy a page or part (Evernote calls it clipping) and Evernote will let me find it. In practice, it's mainly been a write-only memory. I've now got a collection of more than 2230 notes, the oldest one dated to 2010. And I rarely do anything with them. But they are there.

On Chrome I clip pages with the Evernote Web Clipper extension. I click the icon or press a hotkey and Evernote saves it for me. On Android, I've installed the Evernote App, which lets me save things using the Android sharing feature.

Nice things: it automatically classifies my posts, and that generally works well. It lets me tag my content, but I don't take advantage of it. I can organize my stuff in "notebooks" and share notebooks or individual notes with specific users. It's also possible to share with the world, but unfortunate, that's tricky.

In 2011 I started a notebook called "Blogging" that contained articles on blogging. Much later I clipped a few articles that I thought were worth blogging about but I never did anything with them. Now 41 blog-worthy articles in that notebook, including two from yesterday.

Here's a link to my blogging notebook. I wasn't able to create it using the web version of Evernote. Instead, I had to go to a Windows machine and download the Windows version of Evernote and do it there. Annoying. Why not make the web interface fully functional? Why not make it fast.

On review, I like Evernote in concept better than in execution. I've been criticizing myself for not using Evernote more than I do, but maybe it's not just me. Maybe it's Evernote.

So here's my initial design for an Evernote Alternative.