[HN Gopher] Show HN: Link Book - Quickly save links from around ...
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       Show HN: Link Book - Quickly save links from around the web to
       GitHub
        
       Save and sync your web bookmarks using Link Book and GitHub while
       retaining full control of your data
        
       Author : nabeelvalley
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2023-02-12 09:59 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (link-book.vercel.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (link-book.vercel.app)
        
       | cactusplant7374 wrote:
       | Consider a browser extension. Instapaper has one. Also, an iPhone
       | app would be nice so links can be shared and stored from the
       | phone.
        
         | criddell wrote:
         | On the iPhone, you might be able to get away with a Shortcut
         | rather than a full app.
        
           | nabeelvalley wrote:
           | so it has a PWA that handles the web share API so you can
           | share straight to it, but I'm not sure how that handles on
           | iOS
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | I like this idea, will see how feasible it is
        
       | wenjian wrote:
       | any plan to add a dedicated domain instead of vercel.app?
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | not at the moment, I don't plan on monetising it at any point
         | so doesn't really seem necessary
        
       | squeegee_scream wrote:
       | I'm not trying to be rude, but does this do anything more than I
       | can do by saving a web page with "Cmd + S", and storing that
       | saved web page in my cloud storage? My way avoids bit rot, makes
       | it available anywhere, and since my cloud storage is private, no
       | one knows what I'm saving.
        
       | quickthrower2 wrote:
       | Nice idea. Can you reduce the permissions required?
       | 
       | > This application will be able to read and write all public and
       | private repository data. This includes the following:
       | 
       | Can it just be access to that one repo?
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | mentioned this in another comment but yeah will give this a
         | shot, seems like an important point of feedback
        
           | quickthrower2 wrote:
           | Thanks! that is the great thing about feedback ha ha.
           | Obviously the HN crowd are going to be more wary of this.
           | 
           | But even if they weren't, in general you want to _assume_ you
           | will be hacked, and then based what permissions you ask for
           | based on that assumption. I.e. be secure, and use principle
           | of least priveledge, even if the users don 't care. This is
           | why I try to get out of having admin permissions to things at
           | work :-) </rant>
           | 
           | A lot of IoT security problems has that combo of vendor and
           | consumer both not caring/understanding/being aware of
           | security issues.
        
       | kaveet wrote:
       | Do you have a public example of a link-book repo?
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | not at the moment
        
           | prepend wrote:
           | Do you use link-book? Where's your repo? How did you test
           | this?
        
             | nabeelvalley wrote:
             | i use it but the repo is private
        
               | prepend wrote:
               | Might be helpful to set up and use a few public repos.
               | 
               | Or at least convince a single user to do this so you can
               | show your tool in action.
               | 
               | It's always hard to get that first user.
        
       | cpretzer wrote:
       | Neat idea, but it requires too many permissions, IMO
        
       | gramiro wrote:
       | Nice idea!
       | 
       | +1 on reducing the permissions required. You could ask
       | permissions just for individual repositories, and in this case
       | just for `link-book` one :)
        
         | prepend wrote:
         | I think this is important. There's no way I'm going extended
         | permissions to a rando app. Even just giving permissions to a
         | single repo is tricky given the GitHub signin.
         | 
         | I'd rather just grant permissions to a particular user to write
         | to my link-book repo. I think it's more accurate anyway as it's
         | link-book writing stuff, not me.
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | thanks, yeah gonna see what I can do about that in a bit
        
       | dabeeeenster wrote:
       | Is this open source? Be great if you could self host it too.
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | would definitely consider it, the repo may just need a bit of
         | work before it's ready for that
        
           | sodimel wrote:
           | Please do this, I'm interested to see how it work.
        
       | UltimateEdge wrote:
       | I don't quite understand what the intended flow is in this
       | application, but this reminds me of something similar that I've
       | been meaning to implement myself:
       | 
       | I'm thinking of a system that would allow me to 'ingest' browser
       | bookmarks into git, at the precise time they were
       | created/updated. This will allow me to use Chrome's 'native' sync
       | to update/access my bookmarks from a number of devices; when I'm
       | back at my stationary computer (or at a fixed time interval) a
       | script can update a git repository according to the changes I
       | made. Chrome knows when each individual bookmark was updated, and
       | so my script would be able to set the appropriate git commit
       | time.
       | 
       | Setting a precise git commit time (I want not only the date I
       | updated the bookmark, but the time too) is important to me as a
       | consequence of the following two facts: * I like having a history
       | of my actions so that I can find out more details about what I
       | was doing at the time, using tools such as Google Activity and
       | bash history. * I don't want to have to perform some preliminary
       | action (such as running git pull) before I can view my recently
       | added bookmarks.
       | 
       | I already use a similar system for note-taking, with Syncthing as
       | the sync mechanism and a small script for commiting a file at the
       | time it was modified (perhaps on a different device).
        
       | sullija722 wrote:
       | I am not going to give you access to my private repos. Is that
       | really necessary?
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | yeah it shouldn't be, couldn't get the GitHub API to give me
         | access to just a single repo, once I work that out I'll
         | definitely ease the requirement
        
           | throwanem wrote:
           | Only asking for repo:public_repo should solve for the "I'm
           | not giving you private repo access" concern. (I'm not,
           | either! Nothing personal, but if that stuff was ready for
           | prime time it wouldn't _be_ private.)
           | 
           | The "fine-grained token" beta is what you really want to use
           | if you can, because that _does_ give single-repository
           | access, which classic Github OAuth tokens do not. No idea how
           | or if it 's possible yet to use that type of token in your
           | grant flow, but that's where you probably want to be looking.
        
             | nabeelvalley wrote:
             | thanks for the details - I was looking at the fine grained
             | token but the user would then have to provide me with the
             | the token and then I'd have to store that on my end - since
             | i'm trying to avoid storing any user data that doesn't
             | really play into the structure at all
             | 
             | with regards to the public token thing it's a bit of the
             | same complexity since I would need to know if the
             | repository the user is using is public or private and then
             | configure the OAuth scopes appropriately since I do want to
             | have support for private repos (as that's how I use it
             | currently)
        
           | trehans wrote:
           | Could you just create a GitHub user and ask your readers to
           | add that user as a contributor to the repository they want to
           | use for storing bookmarks?
        
       | myself248 wrote:
       | Does this just stash the URL del.icio.us style, or does it
       | actually archive a copy of the page contents for me? I stopped
       | using the former before it even went defunct, because link-rot
       | made the whole concept of saving links effectively useless.
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | yeah so I actually have another app I built for this, it's
         | still not 100% stable but you're welcome to try it out:
         | 
         | articly.vercel.app
        
         | sourcecodeplz wrote:
         | I was considering this when building my own link saver but
         | copyright is so tricky.
         | 
         | On one hand: when you load an URL the contents are already
         | loaded (copied) into your device (browser).
         | 
         | On the other: doing it intentionally is not legal, if you don't
         | have the Right to make a Copy.
         | 
         | Tricky stuff. I was considering making the place you save the
         | contents private but then again when you provide this kind of
         | tool you could get in trouble.
         | 
         | Would like to hear what others think about this.
         | 
         | Maybe naming it "archive"? I understand that's how archive.org
         | gets away with it.
        
           | kzrdude wrote:
           | I don't see how it can be a copyright problem to allow people
           | to save it privately. Especially since every copy is
           | deliberate, i.e user chosen to save that particular page.
        
             | sourcecodeplz wrote:
             | It can be. Providing the tool to do something illegal, with
             | the sole purpose of the tool being to do something illegal,
             | is illegal. Check out the YouTube DL project
             | history/controversy.
        
               | vorpalhex wrote:
               | You are incorrect.
               | 
               | Youtube-dl had a takedown because they specifically ran a
               | circumvention in their tests. They removed the test and
               | were restored.
               | 
               | Youtube-dl is still freely available.
               | 
               | Saving web pages is not illegal nor prohibited.
        
               | mthoms wrote:
               | Making personal copies of articles you read is certainly
               | covered by fair use. Just as photocopies and vcr
               | recordings are.
               | 
               | YouTube DL was alleged to be bypassing copyright
               | protections which doesn't apply to media without any
               | protections like public web pages.
               | 
               | And in any case, it seems the software was reinstated by
               | GitHub after The EFF intervened.
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube-dl
        
               | k_ wrote:
               | Browsers provide the tool to save those pages (ctrl+s),
               | in what way is it different? Honest question, as I'm
               | building something that could be impacted.
        
               | TedDoesntTalk wrote:
               | OP probably thinks taking a photo of the Mona Lisa for
               | personal use is also a copyright violation.
        
           | sodimel wrote:
           | Or just allow to save the content or not?
           | 
           | I'm having such an option on my link-saving project, it lets
           | you choose to save the content in pdf (using the wonderful
           | weasyprint lib) or not.
        
       | DoryMinh wrote:
       | thanks, are you considering a web plug-in?
        
         | nabeelvalley wrote:
         | yup I am
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-12 23:01 UTC)