Would you like to provide 4 million users with an easy way to save information about your website? Chances are that you have heard of Evernote, the on-the-cloud note-taking application available on multiple platforms. One of the newest features announced by the Evernote team is Evernote Site Memory. Here is what Site Memory does for your website:
Allows visitors to save posts from your site – When you add the Site Memory button to your site, visitors can automatically save posts, pages, and content defined by you to their Evernote your visitors can save posts and pages to Evernote as clips. You have total control of what Evernote saves, the save location of the clip, and how the clips are tagged.
Easy Access to Favorites – When visitors return to your website and click on the Site Memory button they are presented with everything that they have ever clipped from your website.
The two items above translate to a better experience for your users as well as repeat visits from users who reference your website on their Evernote notebooks. The two items below translate increased engagement into cash.
Make Some Moolah – Evernote employs a freemium model that provides the software and service free, if users wish to access additional features they have the option to upgrade to the premium version. This is where you make the money. For every referred user that upgrades to the premium account you will receive the first $10 Evernote collects.
Free Advertising – The Evernote team promotes the most popular sites via social media every couple of weeks.
Does this sound like something you would like to implement on your sites? If so follow the instructions below to help you set up Evernote Site Memory on your website.
How to Setup Evernote Site Memory
The first thing you need to do is visit the Evernote Site Memory page. You might also want to sign up for the affiliate program so that you have the code handy when we get to that step.
1. Choose the button design you wish to use.
2. This is the part where you get to customize what is clipped by Site Memory. The best thing you can do is use the Inspect Element feature in Chrome or Firebug in Firefox to find which element contains the actual content you wish to include. There’s no need to include your website’s masthead, sidebar, and other irrelevant elements.
Example of Inspect Element feature in Chrome to determine the Div that contains the content which should be clipped.
When choosing the div for the content to clip keep in mind that you probably don’t want to include the comments section and any other elements that may make up the end of each post.
4. The next step allows you set your website’s name that will be displayed in the Site Memory window after a visitor clicks on the button.
You can also include a name for the Notebook in Evernote that will be used to store clips from your website. Take this opportunity to think about a keyword or term that you would like your website to be associated with.
If you signed up for the affiliate program, enter the referral code in the referral code text box.
A. If you are happy with the preview you are good to go.
5. Select the code provided and right-click to open the menu.
6. Click Copy to save the code to the clipboard.
Now comes the most difficult part of all, adding the code to your site. For some this may be as easy as pasting the code in a specific spot, but for some it will require tweaking CSS/HTML so for the sake of brevity we’ll stick to the basics.
Warning – Before proceeding, please backup your template files.
1. Open your theme’s single.php template file.
Note: I would probably stick to using the Site Memory button on single posts only. No need to add it to archive or index templates, unless the archive and index views on your website include the entire article and not an excerpt.
2. Find the best location (usually below the title or at the end of the post) for the Site Memory button, paste it into the template and save the changes.
To confirm that the button is working open one of your posts and try clipping the article to your Evernote notebook.
Notice how the information you entered in the Button Creator appears in the Clip to Evernote window. Clip from Your Site and the Notebook that is created. Again, when deciding what to use for these items consider sticking to keywords that help brand your site.
When the clip is saved to Evernote make sure to click on the View in Evernote link so that you can see what was included in the clip.
As you can see from the example above it’s worth taking the time to see how your clip turns out when the Clip button is used. I thought that by specifying a specific DIV I would segregate the content and only include information from the post, but the opposite happened. It looks like the entire site was included in the clip so it will take some tweaking and knowledge about your theme’s HTML and CSS to get the right DIV to ensure only information pertaining to the article is included.
Once you’ve got it down for the single posts then you have the option to use the Site Memory button on pages as well.
If you’re looking to customize the Site Memory button beyond the options available above you can visit the Developer page to get the inside scoop in all of the features available and how to implement them. If you don’t want to mess with your website’s template and are looking for a WordPress plugin to simplify the process, Evernote states that they are working on something to simplify the process.
Are you concerned about Site Memory slowing down your website? Don’t be, the buttons are static and the developer’s page even offers a minified JavaScript library that can be used instead.
Do you think you’ll use Evernote Site Memory on your WordPress blogs? Why? Why Not?
I have developed a WordPress plugin for this (WP Evernote Site Memory). It automatically adds the clip button after every post. No customization is necessary, however there are plenty of options available! Check it out on the WordPress Plugin Directory: http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....te-memory/
Looks like a nice tool and a great earning potential for high traffic blogs, but how popular is Evernote? Is it a large used service or a just started one?
Evernote has been around for a while, and it’s definitely one of the larger (if not the largest) online clipboard-type services.
I like the concept and set it up on my site. I am using a Genesis theme, which uses “entry-content” as the div that surrounds post content. I specified it, and as you noted, even with a very specific (and I would think correct) div, it clips the whole page, comments, ads, nav menu, and all.
Could you get a bit more specific on what worked for you? I tried to find some additional advice on the Evernote Site Memory page, but they don’t seem to be real big on support.
Thanks. I think I’ll try to work in an InstaPaper button, too, although I am a little nervous about what these buttons will do to my time-on-site stats with Google Analytics.
Hi Bruce,
I looked at your code briefly. It appears that entry-content is the CLASS the post is contained in. For the Site Memory feature to work you must specify an ID.
Here are two suggestions for you. In your theme files, add a DIV around your post title, post, and post meta information (or whatever you want to be clipped), and within the div put the following: id=”post-”
This will give a unique ID to every post area.
If you then install the WP Evernote Site Memory plugin that I developed for WordPress (http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....te-memory/) it will select this ID automatically by default.
Your second option is to do the same as I said before, only instead of giving it id=”post-“, give it an ID name. That ID name is the ID you would want to clip.
Hope this helps!
id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>” is the code that should be above, not id=”post-“
Thank you, Jonathan!
I should have realized this … Evernote keeps saying ID, and I kept using classes (I assumed they were generalizing, equating div to id).
Thanks again,
Bruce