Best way to bookmark a webpage?

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Hello,

First of all, I wanted to thank the Grist team: I discovered Grist a short time ago, and it’s a great tool, very well thought out, very pleasant to use! Congratulations!

I plan to use Grist as a bookmark manager. I was wondering what would be the best way to simplify saving the web pages I visit with my browser (I use Firefox). The idea would be that in one or two clicks, the title of the page, its URL, and possibly a selected piece of text would be saved.

I thought of two things:

  • either an extension that would use the Grist API. There are “generic” extensions like RESTED or RESTer that allow to play with REST APIs but these extensions seem to me difficult to integrate in a “normal” navigation flow (for example, to extract the title or the URL of the current page).
  • or a bookmarklet integrating javascript code and Fetch API but I don’t know if this is a workable lead. I’m not a developer at all, and my few attempts failed with “Cross-Origin Request Blocked” errors.

Any help, any hint (even vague) is welcome :slight_smile:

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Hi @julien.public_grist. Welcome, and thank you for the kind words.

One idea that comes to mind is using an integrator service that provides a Firefox extension, and supports sending an action to Grist to create a new record. The only one I’ve found so far that has a browser extension with that feature is Zapier, but they unfortunately only provide a Chrome extension.

If you’re open to using a bookmark service, Zapier supports integration with Pocket, which is included with Firefox. One approach would be to set up a trigger in Zapier so that anytime you add a new item to Pocket, Zapier then sends a create record action to Grist and populates the title and URL columns.

We have a guide here on setting up different integrators with Grist, including Zapier: Integrator Services - Grist Help Center

Hope this helps.

George

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Thank you very much for this quick reply. I’ll investigate futhermore your ideas.

(It’s a pity that it’s much easier to solve this kind of problem on Android, with an application like HTTP Shortcuts, than on computer…)

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For your information, I followed your ideas and I have a system that now works very well:

  • I self-host an instance of n8n (thanks to Yunohost), in which I created a very simple workflow with a webhook trigger
  • I have a bookmarklet (copied from Shaarli) that allows me to save any page in one click. Here is the code:
javascript:(          function(){            var%20url%20=%20location.href;            var%20title%20=%20document.title%20||%20url;            var%20desc=document.getSelection().toString();            if(desc.length>4000){              desc=desc.substr(0,4000)+'...';              alert('Le%20texte%20s%C3%A9lectionn%C3%A9%20est%20trop%20long,%20il%20sera%20tronqu%C3%A9.');            }            window.open(              '<WEBHOOK-URL>?post='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(url)+              '&title='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(title)+              '&description='%20+%20encodeURIComponent(desc),'_blank','menubar=no,height=800,width=600,toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,status=no,dialog=1'            );          }        )();

Thanks again!

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