Golinks2

Browsers have gone through tremendous change in the last dozens of years. However, the bookmarks UX continues to remain a painpoint - it needs too many clicks to get to a particular link and it's difficult to organise them. I love the golinks project and thought that it's a decent project idea to implement while serving as a playground to learn django and other tech. The desired feature set is:

• ✅ ability to save links
• ✅ redirect to a link.
• ✅ list the links.
• search through the available - use webassembly and rust for the search feature.
• ✅ have ability to specify the paths as aliases : cs/papers/kafka etc.
• ✅ list subdirectories (for example, when you do go/ref).
• edit and delete url.
• ✅ authenticated logins.
• have the bookmarks associated with each user.
• ✅ heirarchy of bookmarks

requirements

• install the python requirements: pip install -r requirements.txt
• get a postgres server running. Export the DATABASE_URL you want to connect too, for example:
  export DATABASE_URL=postgres://golum:[email protected]:5432/golinks2

usage

• golinks2 serves only authenticated users (in case you host it) and you can create a superuser to login using python's manage.py:

python manage.py createsuperuser

• run the migrations:

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate

• you can use gunicorn to run a local server: gunicorn golinks2.wsgi. You can also just use django's manage.py For gunicorn, the above command launches on port 8000 by default, you can set PORT environment variable for something different.

• For convenience, you should add a search engine shortcut, so if you do something like go/ and press tab, it'll activate golinks2 search.

• you can then start adding bookmarks. For example, add the python documentation under go/python

Once added, you can goto the python reference using go/python

• you can list the aliases using go/l

• golinks2 supports directlory like structure for the aliases. For example, you might organise all references under go/ref and list them:

More ideas:

• add logging framework
• sharing the bookmarks or having user groups
• containerize the application
• It can also be extended to have a personal toolkit - t/ is the toolkit subdomain, wherein the subdomains open in an embedded webview. For example: t/epoch takes you to the eopchconverter website in an embedded view. Hence, a "toolkit"
• beautify the interface
• setup CI/CD (unit tests) only for the repo
• record search result performance (what rank search result is being selected?)
• avy style navigation when listing bookmarks in heirarchy
• use webassembly when introducing search
• performance tests

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doubts:

• concurrency scenario in django - how are long running tasks handled? Does it block the further API use?