Thanks to TV’s many reality shows we all enjoy peeking into others’ lives and sitting in smug judgment…

OMG!  She just bribed the other team. How can the network let her get away with it?

Can a judge really throw a flaming banana at a contestant because he didn’t know how to make Bananas Foster? There’s a lawsuit!

And then there’s the show about people who collect too much stuff—worn out boots, a trampoline long bereft of bounce, a porcelain Siamese cat with one ear. These hoarders seem to think they’ll fix or fiddle and perfect all these things in the future.

But aren’t we all guilty of this behavior on some level? If you’re not stacking up treasures in your garage, chances are you’re bookmarking sites to investigate later. It’s just a question of degree. And organization, perhaps. And if keeping your stuff neat, out of site and organized is the dividing line between pathology and promise, then we can all be grateful for add-ons like ScrapBook.

After installing ScrapBook, it appears as a drop-down menu between “Bookmarks” and “Tools”:

You get to the same choices by right clicking when visiting any website, and you manage the ScrapBook experience in a sidebar:

“Capture Page As…” gives you a bit more control over what you’re saving:

“Capture All Tabs” grabs all the sites you currently have open as tabs. You’re prompted to save them in a folder. Give it a name that groups the tabs, and you can get to that set of sites in an instant:

Once you’ve captured a site, there are all sorts of options for editing it to make sure you’re saving the information you really care about. Left to right, there’s Highlighter, Sticky Annotation (looks like a pencil), Remove the Selection, DOM Eraser, Undo and Save Changes:

The Sticky Annotation feature creates a note-taking area on the page, like a Post-it. But it also lets you attach a link, file or an in-line annotation to content:

The DOM Eraser lets you remove elements from the pages you’ve saved. Select what you want to remove:

And now it’s gone:

There’s also a search feature to help you sift through your saved sites in all sorts of ways:

So the next time a site catches your eye, don’t hold back. Hang onto it and put it right where you can find it in the future with ScrapBook. And if you get lost, there’s a 51-page PDF to help you out.

Post from Elise Allen, who pines after the days when she could fit all her belongings in her 1989 Toyota Camry. See all posts by Elise Allen.