dangerzone!

(officially newsbeuter-dangerzone )

Enhanced, modular, bookmarking for newsboat, newsbeuter, or (for that matter) anything that can pass a title and an URL to a program...or even from clipboard!

Contents

1. About
2. License
3. Prerequisites
4. Installation
5. Services Setup
6. Usage
7. Other Files
8. TODO

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1. About

Credit

dangerzone (previously called newsbeuter-dangerzone, though it's still in that repo) is a modular bookmarking script for the newsboat and newsbeuter RSS readers, but will work with anything that can spit out a string and an URL. It doesn't even need the string - if there is no title passed, it will determine one from the URL.

It can also deobfuscate incoming links and optionally shorten outgoing links.

This uses the ini file format used by agaetr, primarily for API keys and binary file locations; however, if your binaries are on $PATH and you export keys as environment variables, you can skip that entirely.

It also uses the url deobfuscating from muna.

The urlportal script is modified from gotbletu's script, see below.

The modular structure is specifically designed so that it should be easy to create a new module for additional services, as it relies on other programs to actually do the thing. Therefore, if one posting tool dies, another can be found and (relatively) easily swapped in without changing your whole setup.

dangerzone is an anglicization of, well, dangerzone. (Nah, I took a GitHub suggested repository name and it's too late to change it now.)

2. License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. For the full license, see LICENSE.

3. Prerequisites

These are probably already installed or are easily available from your distro on linux-like distros:

• bash
• wget
• awk
• grep
• curl

You will also need:

• fzf
• yad - for GUI mode
• xclip - for capturing URL on clipboard

and one of the following (or something else that is sending URLs to dangerzone - see the GUI mode under usage):

• newsboat
• newsbeuter

You will (obviously) need the bookmarking apps; I've put together several already (that I use); obviously you can use your own. See Services Setup for details.

4. Installation

Download or clone the repository, and put the uncompressed files in a location of your choice. Change into that directory.

• Edit bookmark.sh line 18 so that it matches where you put the files:

export SCRIPT_DIR="$HOME/.newsboat"

• If using newsboat or newsbeuter, edit your config file with bookmark-cmd set to the path where you put the files:

# -- Bookmarks ---------------------------------------------------------
bookmark-cmd "~/.newsboat/bookmark.sh"
bookmark-interactive yes
bookmark-autopilot no

Any service you would like to use needs to have a symlink made from the "avail" directory to the "enabled" directory. For example:

ln -s $PWD/short_avail/yourls.sh $PWD/short_enabled/yourls.sh

You may use as many "out" options as you care to; choose 0 or 1 shortening services.

The INI file

Using the INI file is optional if all of your binary files are on your $PATH or hand-edited in, and you have exported the needed API keys to environment variables.

If you are already using agaetr, then just add the lines that do not exist. The example in this repo shows only the possible options for dangerzone.

After editing agaetr.ini:

• mkdir -p $HOME/.config/agaetr
• cp $PWD/agaetr.ini $HOME/.config/agaetr

5. Services Setup

The services are left unbackgrounded here for maximum compatibility. And most (except for cutycapt or the one that saves all the HTML) only take a second.

Services Not Covered Here

One of the reason there are multiple different example service wrappers (and that they are written in pretty straightforward BASH scripting) is so that future users (including myself) can use them as templates or examples for other tools or new services with as little fuss as possible and without requiring a great deal of knowledge on the part of the user.

If you create one for another service, please contact me so I can merge it in (this repository is mirrored multiple places).

Some have been removed due to changes in the API that made it impractical (Facebook), and some (such as the one for Twitter/X) because of API issues and because I don't give a shit about fascists.

Shorteners

YOURLS (shortener) *

Go to your already functional YOURLS instance. Get the API key from Place the URL of your instance and API key into agaetr.ini.

yourls_api =
yourls_site =

Bookmarking Helpers

GUI browser (output)

Uses XDG-OPEN; no configuration should be needed. However, there are additional examples to show how you can make more outputs so you can choose your GUI browser. One is included specifically for Firefox and for Chromium, there's also a "work browser" one showing an example of where I have it open a specific profile with Waterfox.

If you're looking at how to adapt this for your own use case, these are probably the ones to look at.

Save to Surfraw / Elinks Bookmark file (output)

Examples to show the different paths; this is essentially the "default" bookmarking behavior of newsbeuter/newsboat. They have almost identical formats.

Submit to the Wayback Machine (output)

While there is an official client, I wrote this using curl calls and API Keys. You need an account there to get your own API keys. Place them into agaeter.ini, or export WAYBACK_SECRET and WAYBACK_ACCESS as environment variables.

Mastodon via toot (output)

Install and set up toot. If toot is not in your $PATH, then you need to place the location of the binary into agaetr.ini.

todo.txt / todoman (output)

This actually has integrations for two different todo systems, both Todo-txt and todoman, depending on what is available and installed. It will try todo-txt first. It will add a task made up of the title and the URL. This is a good example of where adding a description during the bookmark creation process is very useful.

Shaarli (output) *

Saves the URL to your Shaarli instance.

Install and set up the Shaarli-Client. Make sure you set up the configuration file for the client properly. Place the location of the binary into agaetr.ini or into your $PATH.

Wallabag (output)

Saves the article to a Wallabag instance.

Install and set up Wallabag-cli. If wallabag is not in your $PATH, then use the agaetr.ini to specify its location. Note that shorteners and wallabag don't get along all the time.

Capture to JPG/PNG/PDF (output)

Utilizes cutycapt. If detox is in $PATH, it will be used to sanitize the title string for use as a filename (you want this). Saves the output in the XDG download directory, usually $HOME/Downloads, which it finds using xdg-user-dir, which is probably already installed on your system. If that fails for any reason, falls back to writing the file to $HOME.

Send to email (output) *

DO NOT BACKGROUND THIS ONE

Uses mutt for sending the email, and if it finds my pplsearch address book helper. Otherwise sends to the email address specified on line 12 of the script.

It will also attach the body of the article as plain text. There are three ways demonstrated in the script (lines 21-28) itself - using lynx, using pandoc, and a horribly convoluted bespoke filter which uses hxclean and hxnormalize and hxunent from html-xml-utils, htmltidy, iconv, and sed.

The default is to use lynx.

Video/Audio via YouTube-Dl (output) *

These are examples of how dangerzone can be used with other programs that handle URLs or even as a standalone tool.

Install and set up youtube-dl in your $PATH. Without editing, these scripts save audio/video into $HOME/Downloads/mp3 and $HOME/Downloads/videos respectively.

6. Usage

Inside newsbeuter/newsboat, press Ctrl-B (by default) to bring up the bookmarking options - it will prompt you with (pre-filled when possible) URL, title, description, and feed. Anything you add into the "description" string will be added to the title string. If no title string is passed, the program will attempt to fetch the title from the webpage.

You will then have a fzf created interface with all the enabled "out" options available to you. Choose as many or few as you like (press TAB to multi-select).

The individual modules are written so that they may be sourced by your other scripts as well. The function called is [filename]_send, so inside pdf_capture the function is pdf_capture_send Pertinent variables are "${title}" and "${link}" .

GUI mode

Using GUI mode (and the clipboard support) will allow you to use this framework with any program. If you invoke bookmark.sh -g [URL] [TITLE] you will be presented with a dialog to use any of the helper programs.

That is only a partial solution, though. So if you simply invoke bookmark.sh -g without anything else, it will use xclip to get the URL from the clipboard, then present the GUI interface.

This means that you can bind any hotkey you like to call bookmark.sh -g and have it pull the URL from your clipboard, using it as a lightweight extension that future updates can't break.

8. Other files

There are other files in this repository:

• muna.sh - Exactly the same as muna. Used to remove redirections and shortening.

• urlportal.sh - I use this as my "browser" helper. Originally from Gotbletu, I added a few things:

• Proper running of GUI image viewers

• -g switch to use GUI instead of CLI

• -c switch to use CLI instead of GUI

• Configurable default of the above

• Switched references to rtv to tuir

• uses terminal-image-cli by default instead of chafa.

• renderer.sh - I use this for rendering articles in newsboat. It's the funky bespoke method I mention above about sending mail.

• renderer_links.sh - I use this for rendering articles in newsboat. Includes URLs.

• renderer_images.sh - I use this for showing the images in newsboat. Collects image URLs in a cachefile with each article view. Call via a macro.

9. TODO

• Test the URL for validity

TODO: add preview function to each of the modules for fzf --preview giving a quick explanation of what it does

CHECK FOR THIS by checking for the preview string which will contain the path of the posters!!!!!!!!!!!!! so

bookmarker_preview=$(ps aux | grep fzf | grep -v "grep" | grep -c ${SCRIPT_DIR}/out_enabled")

so if that's > 0 then.... yup.

TODO: modules for each possible browser?

TODO: Allow calling an editor with multiselect capabilities of fzf?

TODO: Preview current values (and allow editing of) with fzf selection screen

upgraded tmux to 55, so have --tmux popup!

TODO - notify-send integration for output