We have been building a Web Clipper: a small browser extension that saves a web page or a YouTube video straight into your Thoute vault in a single click. It is finished and submitted, and right now it is awaiting approval in the Chrome Web Store. The moment Google approves the listing, you will be able to install it in one click, and your browser will keep it updated automatically from then on. This post is a heads up on what it does and how it will work.
What it does
- Clips web pages. It pulls the main article out of the clutter (no nav bars, ads, popups, or cookie banners) and saves clean, readable text along with the original URL and site name.
- Clips YouTube videos. It saves the title, channel, link, and thumbnail, so a video you want to watch or reference later is one search away.
- Carries your note. Jot why a page matters in your own words before you clip, and the note travels with it.
- Lands in your journal. Every clip is added to today’s daily note, so capturing never breaks your flow. From there you can move it, tag it (try
#researchor#video), or reference it from anything else, exactly like any other block. - Stays findable. Clips also show up under Library, in the Attachments tab, fully searchable alongside everything you have written.
How it will work
- Install the extension from the Chrome Web Store and pin the Thoute icon to your toolbar.
- Click the icon and sign in with your Thoute email and password. The server defaults to
https://app.thoute.com, so leave it as is unless you self host. - If your vault is encrypted, enter your encryption password once to unlock clipping. It stays signed in until you sign out.
- Open any page or video, click the icon, add an optional note, and press Clip to Journal. Done.
It works in any browser built on Chromium that installs extensions from the Chrome Web Store.
A note on privacy
Worth being upfront about this one. When you write inside Thoute, everything is encrypted on your device before it ever leaves. The clipper works a little differently: to turn a messy page into clean, readable text, it hands the page to Thoute’s server, which extracts the article and then encrypts it into your vault. So at the moment you clip, the page contents pass through our server over a secure HTTPS connection, rather than being encrypted purely on your device first. Your clips are stored encrypted in your vault either way. We would rather tell you exactly how it works than imply it is something it is not.
When can I get it?
It is in Google’s review queue now. We will post the install link here and in Announcements the moment it goes live, so you can add it in one click.
In the meantime: what would you want the clipper to do? Clip a selection instead of the whole page? Send to a specific page rather than the journal? Capture PDFs in the browser? Reply below with what would make it most useful to you. That is exactly what this category is for.