zeekhuge / webnotes

Small Firefox extension to publish selection of text with its context (date and URL for now) when Ctrl+Shift+U is pressed.

Webnotes

This is a small Firefox extension to publish selection of text with its context (date and URL for now) when Ctrl+Shift+U is pressed or with a link in the context menu.

If you want, have a look at the presentation video (in french), or my personal webnotes.

Disclaimer: I've done this for myself. I'm happy to share it so other can use it as well, but I'll probably not commit a lot of time maintaining this!

How does it work?

When you hit Ctrl+Shift+U, the content of the selection is sent to an external service (that you have set, which can be under your control, the service is a Kinto server).

You can then configure any other application to access the data you saved. With the current implementation, the stored data is available to everyone (it's my use case) but it can easily be changed to something else if needed.

In the app folder, there is a webpage able to display the notes you've published. You will just need to change the server, bucket and collection to match yours.

How do I install it?

First, go to the addons.mozilla.org page and click "install", then head to about:addons and select "Install addon from file".

Once installed, click on "more" or "preferences" next to the addon name. There, enter your kinto instance, bucket and collection name and then hit save.

Once the values saved, you can initialize the storage by clicking the link.

Where can I see my notes?

In the app folder, there is a webpage able to display the notes you've published. You will just need to change the server, bucket and collection to match yours.

The make serve command will serve the content of this folder on http://localhost:8000.

Using a different Kinto server

If you want to use a different Kinto server, you might want to create a bucket to store all webnotes-related collections.

Here is an httpie command to do so (replace notsecret with the admin password you want to use):

echo '{"data": {"id": "webnotesapp"}, "permissions": {"collection:create": ["system.Authenticated"]}}' | http post https://yourkintoinstance.tld/v1/buckets --auth="admin:notsecret" --verbose

Why doing yet another tool for this?

The short answer is that I actually haven't found one that suits my need and that is open-source.

Wallabag plays a kind of similar role but doesn't currently allow me to save selections of text nor to publish them to somewhere public.