newsbeuter-dangerzone

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

Project maintained by uriel1998 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

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!

dangerzone logo

demo

GUI demo

Contents

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

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 (and even relies somewhat) on the ini file format used by agaetr, primarily for content warnings (for Mastodon) and for API keys, it also uses the url deobfuscating from agaetr and 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:

You will also need:

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

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.

export SCRIPT_DIR="$HOME/.newsboat"

# -- 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 no use for content warnings.

I’m adding value to the agaetr.ini file, the format is the same. The example shows the possible options. You can leave the unused entries blank without any difficulty (unless you’re using agaetr, which it should work with seamlessly). The [Feed] sections are completely ignored with dangerzone.

After editing agaetr.ini:

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).

Shorteners

murls (shortener)

Murls is a free service and does not require an API key.

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

Twitter via Oysttyer (output)

Posts the title and URL to Twitter using Oysttyer.

Install and set up oysttyer. Place the location of the binary into agaetr.ini or into your $PATH.

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. Place the location of the binary into agaetr.ini or into your $PATH. Note that shorteners and wallabag don’t get along all the time.

NOTE: Wallabag-cli after 0.5.0 doesn’t work for me…

todo.txt (output)

Install and set up Todo-txt. It will add a task made up of the title and the URL.

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.

GUI browser (output)

Uses XDG-OPEN; no configuration should be needed.

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. Saves in the $HOME directory.

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.

Mastodon via toot (output)

Install and set up toot. Place the location of the binary into agaetr.ini.

Video/Audio via YouTube-Dl (output)

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.

Facebook

This helper uses urlencode (I got it from the gridsite-clients package on Debian) on the link, then calls sensible-browser with the generic Facebook sharing link. User interaction is required.

6. Content Warning

Currently, content warnings are only used with Mastodon. If you do not wish to have automatic content warnings, remove the [CW##] sections of agaetr.ini.

If you need ideas for what tags/terms make good content warnings, the file cwlist.txt is included for your convenience.

Because of how matching is performed, a filter of “abuse” should catch “child abuse” and “sexual abuse”, etc. However, it matches whole words, so “war” should not catch “bloatware” or “warframe”.

The content warning system is configured in the agaetr.ini as well:

[CW9]
keyword = social-media
matches = facebook twitter mastodon social-media online

The number after [CW does not matter as long as they are not duplicated. The “keyword” is what is outputted as the content warning, the space-separated line after matches is what strings will trigger that keyword as a content warning.

The keyword should NOT be a potentially sensitive word itself.

7. 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).

demo

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.

GUI demo

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:

9. TODO

Steven Saus injects people with radioactivity for his day job, but only to serve the forces of good.
Mostly.