Loyal readers will recall that I love the ScrapBook extension for FireFox. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve researched something (a vacation, an investment, etc.) and collected data by just leaving tabs open, acquiring a mess of bookmarks, or copying and pasting into a text file. With ScrapBook, I can actually store snippets of HTML, complete with style and images.

I recently heard about clipclip, a similar service that’s actually implemented as a bookmarklet that slams a bunch of JavaScript into your page. It’s an incredibly cool hack and it solves one major problem with ScrapBook — they store everything server side for you so you can see your clips from multiple machines. They also have made it more of a community thing — you can share your collections of snippets, tag them, etc. I kind of miss the hierarchical approach that ScrapBook uses, but these days, everything is about tagging, so I might as well get used to it.

Another drawback to ScrapBook is that it only works in FireFox. I receive my blog messages in my email (Thunderbird) so I couldn’t easily add them to ScrapBook. A few months ago, I hacked the extension so that it’d work (kind of) in Thunderbird, but there was always a synchronization issue if you’re using both the browser and email.

Turns out, I needed to learn XUL anyway, so I spent the last few hours writing a Thunderbird extension for clipclip. It works, but it’s not quite ready for release yet. I’m just glad that I finally have this problem solved. An easy way to save parts of web pages and email that works in all browsers and now works in my email client.