I have totally given up hope on classifying all the interesting things I find on the web each day, so I use an uncategorized save all strategy. I save all opened and downloaded files (mostly PDFs) to ~/Desktop/ and I also bookmark things there (by dragging the URL icon onto the desktop). After a few weeks the desktop becomes a complete mess, so I use a script[1] that puts files into subfolders (by extension), and then I put away this "complete week of research" archive and start from a clean slate (except for one or two active projects dirs).
It's a bit time-intensive to find things, but it's not impossible: let's just say the system is optimized for write efficiency and not read efficiency ;)
I like this idea since it solves the issue of easily persisting things you may want to keep around, but wouldn't it limit the types of things you can persist (e.g. can you easily persist ideas/snippets this way)?
Ideas no, but I sometimes drag snippets of text to the desktop too and they get saved as `.textClipping` files.
I think ideas are folder-like structures so I usually create a folder to store code/links/pdfs/clippings specific to that idea, then file away that Idea folder as one piece.
My general advice is to spend less time planning and more time doing, else you might get stuck on what Ze Frank calls "Brain Crack" http://youtu.be/0sHCQWjTrJ8?t=8s
It's a bit time-intensive to find things, but it's not impossible: let's just say the system is optimized for write efficiency and not read efficiency ;)
[1] https://gist.github.com/ivanistheone/9daa23ae2a7abb472cb2