I feel I used these way more in high school than I do now. I know PDF viewers and editors like MS Word have highlighting tools, but I still haven't gotten used to those; mostly because it felt like they made no difference... technically. Until now.

Also, Happy 2021! I know we said last year would be our year... but I'm confident this will be the one. A year to start something, learn something new, get better at something, or simply taking a break-- you deserve it all (specially, and specifically, if you read these tech-letters). 

Student, teacher, researcher, or enthusiast, there is a lot of content online and often times we (I) struggle to organise all of it. Weava is a Google Chrome/Brave extension that allows you to do just that, without being limited to just PDF files.

Let me start by listing the key features.

1. Highlight. Whether it's a blog post, magazine, research paper, or even Facebook, Weava lets you highlight all sorts of text for you to keep track of "what is important". Every highlight comes with the added advantage of annotations.
2. Look back at your highlights. Once you use your colourful neon marker, where are the highlights stored? Weava presents you with your own dashboard where you can browse through everything you've highlighted.
3. Organise. Nobody expects you to highlight content only related to one topic. Weava lets you create categories and subcategories where you can store everything you highlight. Reading about Cryptocurrency but want to save information on Bitcoin? The latter can have its dedicated sub-folder.
4. Once again, collaboration. Share your findings if you need to. If you're a student or researcher, you even get the added benefit of creating a bibliography for/from your highlights.

While, and after highlighting, you're able to access your side panel, where you can see all of the things you've highlighted. Here, you can add notes to each highlight, copy them, or simply delete them. You can even click and drag them, which opens up another side panel with all your folders (the categories/subcategories I mentioned earlier) where you can organise all of these highlights.

This is what your dashboard looks like.

The dashboard is where you can go through all of your saved content, share your content, or even upload and highlight PDFs from your machine (instead of simply highlighting articles online). P.S. at this point I'm slightly tired of typing "highlight".

Take a look at the highlight I created above-- it's titled "What's your go-to font". That's from a previous tech-letter. I didn't "name" this highlight, Weava automatically figured it out when I highlighted content on that page. From here, I can even choose to cite my highlight. This is what the result would look like:

Rakhyani, P. (2020, December 12). What’s your go-to font? 🖋. Retrieved from https://preview.mailerlite.com...

Now, I'll have you know that I once cited my own blog as a source for a term paper at grad school, and got an A. So feel free to use me as a reliable source.

Weava is free to use (with limitations). The free version has unlimited highlights and notes, but only 5 highlight colours and 3 sub-folders. You also can't collaborate and have a 100 MB storage limit (this is not a deal breaker for me, but you have your own requirements). Of course, the premium version offers a lot more. Currently, the latter is going for a discounted price of $4 a month or $40 a year, and students get an 85% discount too.

Price? Free (with Premium option) ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Format? Browser extension ⭐⭐