If you come across an article or web resource that you’d like to save for later reading, you can do that with Ultimate Brain and one of three tools:
- The official Notion Web Clipper (basic)
- The Save to Notion extension (intermediate, but better)
- Readwise (advanced)
With the Notion Web Clipper and Save to Notion, web clips can be saved directly into Ultimate Brain.
Readwise does not allow this; clips will be synced to a special Library database that Readwise creates within your Notion workspace. However, I’ve included a video tutorial below that will show you how to integrate this database into Ultimate Brain sections - including Resources, Areas, and your Notes dashboard.
Official Notion Web Clipper
Install the Notion Web Clipper in your browser. You’ll then see a small Notion icon in your browser’s toolbar. This will allow you to “clip” web pages, saving them into your Notion account.
When you come across a resource you want to save, click the Notion Web Clipper icon:
- Ensure the correct Notion workspace is selected.
- Select your All Notes [UB] database to ensure the item is added correctly to Ultimate Brain.
- Click Save Page.
The Notion web clipper doesn’t allow us to set specific database properties when clipping web pages, which means that your clipped pages will show up in your Note Inbox.
They’ll also show up in the Note Processing area in the Process page, which has a special tab for Web Clips.
Either page is a good place to process your web clips by adding either an Area, Resource, or Project (depending on where you want the clip saved.)
If you save your web clip to an Area or Resource, it’ll show up in the Web Clips section.
Here’s where you’ll find Web Clips in a Resource:
Within an Area, you’ll find a Web Clips tab under Area Notes. This collects web clips saved directly to the Area as well as any that exist in Resources contained within that Area.
Save to Notion
Save to Notion is an unofficial browser extension that comes with more capabilities than Notion’s official web clipper.
Using it, you can set properties to your web clips - including Areas or Resources. This means you can bypass the Note Inbox when clipping web pages!
Save to Notion also allows you to create individual highlights (much like Readwise), rather than just clipping the entirety of a web page’s content.
Check out the video above to learn how to use Save to Notion, and to brush up on its quirks and limits.
Readwise
Jump to 09:42 in the video above to learn how you can integrate Readwise with Ultimate Brain.
Readwise is a powerful highlight-saving app that allows you to collect highlights from web pages, Kindle books, tweets, podcasts, and more. It also allows you to automatically export these highlights to Notion.
In my opinion, Readwise currently provides the BEST tools for clipping highlights into Notion.
You can even combine it with Hypothes.is to get persistent web page-highlighting (i.e. your highlights “stick” on the webpage even after refreshing):
However, Readwise comes with one major downside: It does not allow you to choose which Notion database your highlights are exported to.
Instead, Readwise creates its own database.
This means that you’d need to use Linked Databases to manually integrate Readwise’s Notion exports with Ultimate Brain (or any other template).
Fortunately, the Readwise integration video above will show you exactly how to do that!
