Pack Bookmarks (Chrome)

It's been a while since I wrote something here. A lot of personal and professional changes happened to me in this period. But this is a different story.

Below is another story ...

The issue

Recently I had a need to send few links to friend of mine. All links was saved as Chrome Bookmarks. I've opened all of them and send him the all the links.

I've lost some time to open all the links and then copy and paste them. So I've decide to make a little chrome extension and small node.js app/server that will help me in the future to simplify this process.

The extension give you option to select few bookmarks and "pack" them. The server part will get the urls and will return a short link from goo.gl, which will lead to a simple web page where the bookmarks links will be "un-packed".

The solution

The Extension

In terms of functionality the extension is pretty much ready. There might be need of few design changes in near future. And after the server part is moved to more reliable place I'll need to update the link for server communication.

The Server

Again in terms of functionality the server is ready. 3 methods are available:

• new - to create new "pack" link
• get - display the links in the "package" and actually the goo.gl link is leading to this page
• custom - option to "pack" link manually without the Chrome extension

The Future

The Extension

One feature that can be added to the extension is to have the same functionality and for opened tabs.

The Server

A lot of things need to be added to the server part.

• Most needed is design. At the moment there is not design ... literally :)
• After the design part I'm thinking to make change in the server code - build REST API and make the server part to self consume the API. Also to enable the API for 3rd party users (if somebody is interested)
• Change the data storage - at the moment whole data is stored in file storage. Need to move it to proper MongoDB db
• When above changes are made I'll move the server part on more reliable server. At the moment is just a dev box in Codio.

Be aware that the server is in development for the moment and migh not work all the time

And of course publish the code for the extension and server (so the real developers have a chance to have a good laugh after see it :) )

The extension is published for anyone with link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pack-bookmarks/behnbnpefkgolldpingmeabfnbkdjhno

And below is a screenshot from the extension itself:

Thats it for now.

Hope you like it!
Stefan