This is probably clearly documented somewhere, but it took me by surprise. If you have a full “attributed string” url in your clipboard (meaning you used ctrl-click “Copy Link”) and you pop up Notational Velocity and hit the Command-Shift-V shortcut, it will actually download all of the text of the page the link leads to, title it and insert the original url at the beginning?

NV web download screenshot

I haven’t tried it on the original version, so I don’t know if it’s been there the whole time or if someone built it in along the way, but it’s pretty cool. It’s not the cleanest output, just the full text with most of the tags stripped. It retains some formatting (bold, italics, font size) as Rich Text, but you can clean it up quickly and convert to plain text with a quick “select all” and Command-T.

For nvALT, I’m thinking about trying to take the raw HTML string, run it through a Readability / Clippable / Instapaper-type algorithm and then “markdownify” the resulting html. That would make it a really useful tool for me, akin to the Clippable to Evernote service.

First up, though, is social sharing of notes via peg.gd, thanks to a collaboration with former TUAW colleague Robert Palmer of Honest Code. You’ll be able to click an icon on the Preview HUD and post a rendered version of your current note as a web page, and get back a short url for sharing. I won’t say much more than that until I have some more code written, but I’m pretty excited about the possibilities.