Dynalist works great as a content organizer. What else do we use to organize content? Browser tabs. Quite often, we use two in parallel; Dynalist for content indexing, and browser tabs for displaying/editing.
There are many extensions that tackle browser tabs to help us organize them better. Some offer hierarchical views, few offer tagging and markup. None integrate with Dynalist.
In essence, if we could connect the tabs in the browser with Dynalist items, then we wouldn’t need a powerful tab organizer plugin – Dynalist does most of the heavy lifting. In a minimalistic implementation, one can think of a Chrome plugin that the user can trigger to:
- store the current browser tab configuration as sub-items on a preconfigured “tab root” item;
- restore the browser tab configuration from sub-items on the “tab root”.
This can be done in a flexible manner that preserves all content, allowing the user to decide if things should reopen or not, e.g.:
- When saving, items with URLs not currently open as tabs are not removed but struck through (marked as “done”);
- When restoring, all “active” (not marked as “done” / strikethrough) items are restored;
- In general, as long as an item contains a valid URL, the item it is valid for restoration (say the first URL will be treated as tab content). This leaves users free to take notes, tag, reorganize, add children etc.
This can be expanded with autosyncing, multiple “tag root” elements, browser search, etc. But the basic idea is to enable folks to connect the content they are seeing with content they are organizing.