[HN Gopher] Show HN: Electric Tables - an experiment in personal...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Electric Tables - an experiment in personal databases
Author : topcat31
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-01-26 18:46 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tomcritchlow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tomcritchlow.com)
| ollymeakings wrote:
| Love where this is going. What are some of the key use case, or
| too early?
|
| Also, what did you use to record the video, it looks really
| slick?
| topcat31 wrote:
| Some use cases that I'm _already_ using it for even in the
| limited state:
|
| * Making topic-focused lists of articles. e.g. researching a
| particular topic just grab a bunch of URLs and stick them in a
| table
|
| * Real estate research - grabbing a bunch of locations and
| adding them to a table, but where price and image are auto-
| grabbed (and adding notes)
|
| * Making a list of gift ideas
|
| * Making a running list of music I want to check out
|
| These are mostly simple bookmarking use cases.
|
| What I *really* want to be able to do is publish these lists
| (either as HTML or as JSON endpoints) and collaborate on them
| with others! But that requires building a server and login etc
| that all feels a bit beyond my coding skills.....
|
| The video I made with Tella: https://www.tella.tv/ - very neat
| 2sk21 wrote:
| This is great and is remarkably similar to a project that I have
| been working on :-) Instead of using a bookmarklet, I am
| extracting URLs from the Reading List feature of Safari. I
| realized hat I had collected over a thousand links in my reading
| list and it was getting difficult to manage this manually. One
| nice thing about working with the reading list is that it is
| shared between iPhones, iPads and Macs if they are all signed
| into the same Apple ID.
| distrill wrote:
| Chrome and Firefox will synchronize bookmarks between all of
| those devices too, without relying on Apple's walled garden or
| having to use Safari.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| This is genius and scratches a bookmarking itch I've had for
| ages. I hope you'll press on with this and continue its
| development. Its pretty close to a state where I would pay for it
| if:
|
| 1. It integrated with whatboard.app ... either via Zapier or on
| its own.
|
| 2. I could manage tables.
|
| 3. I could share tables.
|
| 4. Search.
|
| 5. Themes/Skins.
| Softcadbury wrote:
| I'm not on my computer so I couldn't check, but the bookmarklet
| opens an iframe right ? I worked on a similar project and
| unfortunately some websites doesn't allow that. What we end up
| doing was open it in another window if it was blocked. I could
| share the code if you're interested
| akpa1 wrote:
| I love this idea, especially the bookmarklet aspect of it. I'm
| interested to see where it goes.
|
| I use a couple of bookmarklets, and they're really, really handy:
|
| - One automatically takes me to the pkg.go.dev documentation of a
| Go library if I'm looking at, say, the GitHub page
|
| - The other adds the current page I'm reading to my reading list,
| which is a mostly complete selection of stuff I've read on the
| internet - it does a similar thing by extracting titles and
| images and saving them into a CSV on a Git repo.
|
| The one issue I have with bookmarklets is that, while they will
| sync across mobile and desktop versions of Firefox, the
| implementation on Firefox mobile feels a little clunky and
| cumbersome, and sometimes straight-up doesn't work.
| rektide wrote:
| > _Note, because of technical reasons (content security policies)
| some sites (e.g. Twitter, Airbnb) will add to Electric Tables,
| but in a new tab instead of using a pop-up and it won't grab much
| additional data.._
|
| so so so frustrating. extensions getting whacked into irrelevance
| by CSP is such a vulgar sick security misfeature. what a
| repulsive era of oversecuritization we've FUD'ed ourselves into.
| the only voices at the table are those hungry to lock down & deny
| power to users; technical authoritarianism without check.
|
| the only workaround i can see is abandoning extensions & making
| devtools the new way we extend user-agency. the browsers, the
| standards folks are killing regular user-agency. they are forcing
| us to climb down to a lower security ring.
|
| wonderful world changing extensions like Hypothesis are also
| broken on sites like twitter and airbnb. making the web read
| only, removing all user agency, is so not ok. projects like
| Electric Table show hints of the better web that many long hoped
| was to come, that has slowly been emerging. but this potential is
| being cut off, in the most critical areas. somethings got to
| give. we cant floruish, cant survive a corporate controlled web.
| Rygian wrote:
| > era of oversecuritization we've FUD'ed ourselves into
|
| Are you referring to the OWASP living proof that sites are
| built insecurely? I strongly disagree with your
| characterization of the state of web security. We need a lot
| more, and we didn't get where we are through FUD but through
| actual exploits and billions in losses and frauds.
| gardenfelder wrote:
| Indeed. This project feels worthy of exploration, and
| collaboration. There's an AirTable clone
| https://github.com/nocodb/nocodb; makes me wonder how the two
| projects can be federated. Happy to talk about that.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Psst, put a space between the url and punctuation, like
| semicolons, after it
| btown wrote:
| It seems the reason this is being bonked by CSP is that it's
| not a browser extension, but rather a bookmarklet, and it's
| bookmarklets that are being whacked by CSP. And it's sad,
| because bookmarklets were even more in the ethos of zero-
| install than extensions are - but that's a double edged sword
| if malicious actors use it on unwitting customers.
|
| Where extensions are _actually_ getting whacked beyond what is
| necessary for security, though, is Chrome 's Manifest V3, which
| is tightly cutting down on the ability of extensions to eval
| code, run background tasks, and run custom logic to intercept
| web requests. Anti-ad-blocking considerations are creating
| massive conflicts of interest here, straight to the point of
| the last paragraph in the parent. It's not a good direction for
| the open web.
|
| See: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-
| manifest-v3-st...
| rektide wrote:
| Many thanks for the post. My apologies for getting this
| wrong! It does make more sense that bookmarklets would not
| have the privilege necessary. It'd be nice to give them an
| escape hatch, a way to escalate:
| `javascript+user:alert(1+1);` But this ultimately feels a lot
| less pernicious & more understandable (as an oversight) than
| I'd made things out to be.
|
| I think you've got the eye on the ball here, on where the
| really important issues are shaking down. Diving back into
| smaller-grained topics, I find it interesting how much focus
| the web request interception has gotten versus so many other
| topics of the Web Extensions clamp-down happening. I couldn't
| find any discussion of the removal of eval/dynamic code, for
| example (daggers of irony: the same rule Apple uses to forbid
| v8 on iOS), & opened what I believe is the first issue
| against that. https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/139
| . The background tasks discussion is another important one:
| extensions no longer having most of the web platform
| accessible to them would be extremely limiting. Discussion
| here is active (if not totally hope inspiring), with
| proposals such as "Limited Event Pages"
| https://github.com/w3c/webextensions/issues/134 trying to
| move things into the right direction.
| topcat31 wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure that Electric Tables is quite so
| grandiose as all that but I appreciate the sentiment!
|
| As for CSP - I'm not technical enough to really understand why
| it needs to exist or how it might be re-architected but as a
| hobby coder I love it when things are extensible / hackable and
| CSP seems to be a pain in the ass!
| greenie_beans wrote:
| this looks dope, can't wait to try it out. thnx for sharing
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| Electric Tables looks quite cool and I love the thought process
| going into it.
|
| It seems like it could pair really nicely with the work that
| Ink&Switch (https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first) is doing
| around local-first app development and Automerge
| (https://github.com/automerge/automerge) as a good way to keep
| disparate private copies of work in sync.
|
| I have no connection to Ink&Switch, other than appreciating their
| work.
| samwillis wrote:
| If looking at CRDTs you should also consider Yjs:
|
| https://github.com/yjs/yjs
| parentheses wrote:
| good shares!
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| I would love this even more if I could install it and run it
| locally, so I can use sql or similar on it too
| [deleted]
| dunham wrote:
| There was a project out of MIT CSAIL back in 2006 that did
| automated extraction of tabular data from web pages. e.g. product
| lists on a store site. It recognized pagination and looked for a
| sequence repeated DOM structures (and what varied in them) to
| identify the items. You might find it interesting:
|
| https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.90....
| topcat31 wrote:
| "We propose that web sites can be similarly augmented with
| other sophisticated data-centric functionality, giving users
| new benefits over the existing Web." - gonna check this paper
| out!
|
| Reminds me also of this amazing project that also deals in
| structured data and tables:
| https://www.geoffreylitt.com/wildcard/
| ydant wrote:
| This is a really cool concept. A lot of my "web foraging" (love
| that expression) or data foraging really is exactly what he's
| mentioning here.
|
| Also made me think of a related extension https://braintool.org/
| - whose job is to grab and organize your bookmarks into an org
| file.
|
| I could see these two concepts being combined for pretty powerful
| bookmarks / personal knowledge-base without relying on a server.
|
| The custom selectors on Electric Tables is pretty cool, too -
| kind of a web-scraping light for ad-hoc scraping.
|
| All too often I find myself with a project that's not quite worth
| writing a scraper, but also worth building a Google Sheet around.
| Electric Tables seems like it could help those cases a lot.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-26 23:00 UTC)