Hacker News Reader

Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for answering. Some suggestions after using it for 5 minutes: I apparently have close to 100,000 URLs from Firefox waiting to be indexed.

- Show the date range from the earliest bookmark to the latest

- Let me open the downloaded content for a URL instead of redirecting me to the current online version.

I'm also wondering if the downloaded "extract" is somewhat complete. For example, reader mode doesn't really work on HN or Reddit, but the individual comments could be what I'm looking for. Anyways, I'm keeping an eye on this tool. Not sure if it really fits into my workflow, but maybe it will :)

View on HN

Wow, what a great URL collection.

It should indeed work for HN posts (this was something we specifically wanted). For example, here's this thread at the time of indexing: https://pastebin.com/shx8miZk

You can also access all this yourself within the datasource_browsing_history_fts table of ~/.config/persistory/persistory.db (so named for legacy reasons...)

Regarding the point about accessing the content directly, this is something we're considering. In our testing there's a bit of tension between ideal text for searching (limited formatting) and ideal text for rendering (probably markdown). However, having the local db serve as your own personal archive.org is one of our secondary goals.

Edit: added a bit more context

Hey WA, Nik here, thanks for the suggestions. Showing the date ranges is a good idea, and we’d also like to make what’s shown in the search results more configurable since we have some potentially interesting metadata there (date last visited, date we downloaded the full text etc.)

We do keep a fairly complete copy of the URL’s contents in the db, though we don’t currently preserve all the html or store embedded content such as images, so some formatting may be lost. Adding a method to view the stored version from the GUI is definitely on the todo list though, we want that feature too!

Being flexible and able to fit into a lot of workflows is high priority for us, if you have more thoughts on how it could more easily fit into your workflow please feel free to let us know here or on the discord

Reply on news.ycombinator.com