I shared my Linkding bookmarking plugin to the Newsboat project. It’s in the contrib directory. It works fine as a standalone tool, too, if you just want to push a bookmark up from the command line. I submitted a PR for the Wallabag version, too.

Collaborative introvert

Today had some unpleasant aspects to it. I had to do one of those things where you both don’t want to get a lot of practice at it, but feel grateful you’ve had the practice.

I also felt grateful to have partners to work with on the whole thing who were both willing to share ideas and tools, but also let me plot my own course. It felt like the right balance of “not up here completely without a safety net” and “able to follow my instincts.” When things went a little off-road, I felt able to improvise and adjust without looking over my shoulder.

I think I am an okay collaborator, but I know there are times that my internal models take over and it’s hard for me to shake myself out of whatever I had in my head as The Right Thing. My introversion sometimes makes it hard to read the room when I’m going too far that way. When I realize I have, I usually pull back unless I’ve gotten into a headspace where I feel unyielding on the matter. That’s rare. I wish I had a little better sense of how I come off. Even the times I’ve thought I must sound like I’m close to exploding, people say “no, had no idea. Really? You just seemed your normal self.”

I mentioned that to Al this morning, because as I was getting ready to do the unpleasant but needful, she said “you seem pretty calm.” My wrist vibrated and I looked down and it was my blood glucose monitor telling me my blood sugar was spiking. I’ve learned that correlates with stress a lot of the time. I held up my watch and read her the number.

“There’s a lot going on in there,” she said.

There is.

Now I have two scripts for bookmarking in Newsboat, but it only has one reserved key for bookmarking a post. It does have macros, though, so you can use one to set the bookmarking command to a given script and bind it to something memorable. My mutt convention is to lead macros with a period, so I kept that here by unbinding Newsboat’s default macro prefix (,) and setting “.”.

So, .l to save to Linkding, .w to save to Wallabag:

# macros
bind-key . macro-prefix
unbind-key ,
macro w set bookmark-cmd "op run --env-file=\"$HOME/.env\" -- ~/bin/wallabag.rb"; bookmark
macro l set bookmark-cmd "op run --env-file=\"$HOME/.env\" -- ~/bin/linkding.rb"; bookmark

And here’s the Wallabag bookmarking script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'httparty'
require 'json'

entry_url = ARGV[0]

wallabag_url="https://reader.example.net"

client_id = ENV['WALLABAG_CLIENT']
client_secret = ENV['WALLABAG_SECRET']
username = ENV['WALLABAG_USER']
password = ENV['WALLABAG_PASSWORD']

token_params = {grant_type: "password", client_id: client_id, client_secret: client_secret, username: username, password: password}
token_req = HTTParty.post("#{wallabag_url}/oauth/v2/token", body: token_params)
access_token = token_req["access_token"]

headers = {'Content-Type' => "application/json", 'Authorization' => "Bearer #{access_token}"}
params = {url: entry_url, starred: 0, archive: 0}
resp = HTTParty.post("#{wallabag_url}/api/entries.json", body: params.to_json, headers: headers)

Newsboat is pretty cool! It’s a plaintext RSS reader that has strong affinities for mutt in look and configuration.

Like mutt, it might not crowd out everything else in the toolbox but it can help you burn through the subscription list and triage even if you have more comfortable ways of reading the content you process.

It also has built-in filtering. If you’re using an RSS provider that already does that, e.g. FreshRSS or Feedly, that might not be super valuable, but it’s easy to make a killfile either way:

ignore-mode display
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/ducks/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/advice/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/nfl/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/beavers/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/blazers/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/highschoolsports/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/entertainment/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/realestate-news/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/food/\""
ignore-article "*" "link =~ \"/hawks/\""

Scripting the Linkding API to make a bookmark function for Newsboat

If you like reading longform plaintext maybe Newsboat is all you need. I tend to treat RSS as a two-step process: See an interesting thing, send it to some sort of RIL or bookmarking service. Newsboat has a bookmarking function you can customize with your own scripts. It just passes the article URL, title, description, and website description to your script, which has to talk to whatever API. There are a bunch of examples in the Newsboat contrib directory for things like Pocket, Pinboard, and Evernote. No Linkding, but the Linkding API is simple enough.

Could be simpler but I bounced off of net:http in my formative years:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'httparty'
require 'json'

linkding_uri = "https://links.puddingtime.net/api/bookmarks/"

# Get your Linkding API key from Settings > Integrations

token = ENV['LINKDING']

link_url = ARGV[0]
link_title = ARGV[1]
description = ARGV[2]
website_title = ARGV[3]

params = {url: URI(link_url), title: link_title, website_title: website_title, unread: true}
headers = {'Content-Type' => "application/json", 'Authorization' => "Token #{token}"}

resp = HTTParty.post(linkding_uri, body: params.to_json, headers: headers)