Using Tabs Outliner to easily collect and capture groups of links, ready to import into Viper Ripper
I've played around with a bunch of utilities and programs to try and find the best solution to grab links/bookmarks, easily exportable, and preferably in whatever groupings you want as you go. Tabs outliner is one solution. It's an addon for Chrome, get it from the chrome store.
Once you've installed it, click on the button added to your addons bar. It will resize your browser window and add one to the side (this seems clumsy, but I understand Chrome doesn't allow for such a toolbar to be placed inside the window. Ah well.) It looks a bit archaic and overwhelming... but for this purpose, it's pretty simple.
There is one setting needed to be changed, under the "General" tab in settings. That's "Do not auto-scroll the main view on active Chrome window switch." Turn this on, this will stop the Tabs Outliner window from flicking around to whatever tab/window you are on in Chrome, and the window will stay static as a target list for you to drop urls onto.
You'll see your current "session", and if you want to play with sessions go for it. If you just want to capture groups of persistent links, don't use this feature or the "window" icon, it will open windows, close it off when you click on it, etc. Also, just leave your current session as is, ignore it. For the purpose of capturing links, hover near the bottom and a toolbar will spring up. Drag the group icon (like an open package), up into the window into a clear space.
You can rename the group to whatever you want by hovering on it and clicking the edit button.
Now you can drag and drop links on top of this "group", and it will capture the url. If you want to get the current page, you can do so by clicking and dragging to the right of the url bar in chrome (where it might say "secure"). You can make as many groups as you want...
When you want to export the links to VR or notepad or whatever, just drag the group into the relevant window, eg the VR "import" screen. Or, you can select the group and Ctrl-C to copy to the clipboard.
Quirks:
If you want to delete your group all at once, it needs to be collapsed - otherwise it will just delete the group heading and leave all your links. If you want to clear out a group but keep the group title intact, you need to delete all the links inside one by one. These are just niggles really, but it looks like you can get much more control in the full version.
Other tips:
- You'll notice it works in "nodes", like windows explorer folder tree. If you're a number of big groups, you'll probably want to collapse your groups so that you can see them all at once, instead of the links inside.
- You can zoom the tabs outliner window like any browser window, using ctrl-mousewheel, if you want to make your targets bigger (or smaller).
- You can drag or paste lists of urls from elsewhere, or using a utility/addon (like Linkclump) and it will add them as a "note". So these will be included in the group if you paste it elsewhere. Nifty.