you should productize this idea. I would use it.
It's a bit hassle to print to PDF every time, but if the barrier is low enough, it would be useful.
It's a bit hassle to print to PDF every time, but if the barrier is low enough, it would be useful.
The entire point is that there is absolutely no need for a third party to get involved in organising your web browsing history or remembering your bookmarks. Use the shell. Very few third-party services will be able to match the power of this tooling, for the reasons I gave above. My history = my data, for my own private purposes.
Reading through your comment i can already imagine you sitting there probably thinking all these inferior "normies" who don't deserve to enjoy convenience in their lives because they don't know tech.
Well, everybody on this site is a "hacker" yet not everybody has time and discipline to devote to doing this all the time. And I don't care for learning every single esoteric automation features on my computer. It's kind of weird giving a positive comment and getting all these negative snarky comments back.
Lastly it's stupid to think "Productization" is some evil thing. Productization simply means take some process that's useful and make it easily accessible for other people. It doesn't even mean you sell it for money. If you don't care about improving other people's lives, that's fine, but don't be so condescending about people who genuinely appreciate the idea and just wanted to provide some positive feedback.
Let's say you want to enable someone to make coffee at home. One could imagine two different approaches:
a) you give that person a bean grinder, some equipment to match their taste (e.g. an espresso machine or a chemex), and teach them how to make a tasty cup of coffee in their kitchen.
b) you give that person a nespresso machine, and tell them to order capsules once a month from amazon.com
Computing used to be much more like the former approach, philosophically. The foundations that we rely on today were about small, composable, modular programs, operating using well documented open standards and protocols. This approach gave us things like UNIX/POSIX and the internet.
However, mainstream computing has shifted towards much more about the latter kind of approaches. You stay in the walled gardens, you have no way to directly manipulate your data, and you're reliant on _features_ to get anything done.
In our previous coffee example, "pulling a long shot" would have to be a "feature" on the Nespresso machine, that the designers at Nespresso decided to surface on their machine as a switch of some sort for the end user to access. For approach a) though, it's something you can naturally do as part of the process.
One could also argue that a) is also maybe more aligned with the hacker ethos.
That's where my frustration at overzealous productization in computing comes from.
That's not even getting into how approach b) tends to be consistently worse for the environment and society.