Extension or Workflow for Archiving Tabs in Browsers

[Pheoxy]

So while this isn't primarily a fanficfare issue I just wanted thoughts on this from the community and if they have any existing way of doing this that could maybe be added to the wiki or even create a new extension for this for use in browsers that would leverage fanficfare.

I thought this would be pretty awesome if we had some way old tabs or bookmarks could be grabbed automatically and entered into some sort of automation workflow in cases especially where you tend to read and not finish fiction but it tends to stay in your browser like in Firefox on Android. This would be primarily for some sort of archiving purpose and to free up your poor phone of all the tabs.

(Not sure if everyone has this issue 😅.)

It would be extra cool if it could bookmark somehow the chapter for later reading so we know what we were up to. Although I don't believe most or any formats fanficfare exports to support the meta data for this?

If this would also require some form of self hosted container or service running fanficfare I'm interested how it can or is being done as well, especially in cli form that may integrate calibre in some way.

I understand we also have, https://github.com/JimmXinu/FanFicFare/wiki#automatedfanfic-for-fanficfare-cli for updates but initially adding it can be clunky.

[JimmXinu]

This is well beyond FanFicFare's purpose, which is primarily to be a tool for creating ebooks for keeping and reading stories offline.

I would suggest you search for tools/browser add-ons to archive pages/tabs. WebToEpub is one starting place.

I'll leave this open for the moment, but this isn't really a place for such a discussion.

[Pheoxy]

This is well beyond FanFicFare's purpose, which is primarily to be a tool for creating ebooks for keeping and reading stories offline.

I would suggest you search for tools/browser add-ons to archive pages/tabs. WebToEpub is one starting place.

I'll leave this open for the moment, but this isn't really a place for such a discussion.

Sorry about that I got a bit ahead of myself and needed to write it down and this happened.

Probably need to open another issue for this but what would be required to self host your original website service you used with google? Whether by bare bones cli server start command or did you just wrap around it?

I'm curious if this could be made into a container image for use with docker or similar and then it's up to the user to set it up and run when required.
I don't want to redo work if it's not required and I remembered it working well years ago.

I don't mind giving it a go to make a dockerfile and dockercompose file in a pull request if you have some pointers on how you achieved it.

[Pheoxy]

And while it's more of a question than anything. What's your stance on something like a browser extension that talks to a self hosted fanficfare cli or directly has it packed within it?

[JimmXinu]

what would be required to self host your original website service you used with google?

No idea. It's been years.

I have barely used Docker at all. I don't know anything about the practical details.

My understanding is that browser extensions are javascript and FFF is written in python.

I have considered on occasion some sort of browser extension adjunct, but it's been in the context of making web requests from the browser to work around cloudflare.

From your original description, it sounds to me more like you should start from scratch, or from a browser extension, rather than FFF.

[LoisGNS]

Since I often want to save tabs with content from a variety of sources & on a variety of topics, I have cobbled together something that works for me (though given its cobbled-together state, it might not be helpful for anyone else unless someone far more capable than I were to improve it). Here's what I use:

1. a Firefox extension: Print Friendly & PDF. It works best in my workflow for it to be the first extension on my extensions toolbar. There is a version for Chrome, but since FF is my primary browser, that's what I use.
2. a Python program generated with a lot of help from an AI (I'm barely Python-literate). The program does this:

• Starts with FF opened to the first of a group of tabs that I want to save
• Asks for a number of tabs to save, then iterates through them, using the pyautogui library to send keystrokes to invoke the Print Friendly extension, copy contents to the clipboard, open a Microsoft Window and paste from the clipboard.

I then go to Word, which now has several documents open representing the pasted content, and run a Word macro to do some cleanup and save the documents. Each tab has its own document and the macro tries to find the title at the beginning of the document to use for a file name.

Finally, I check each resulting document (some don't get proper filenames and are saved as "document 1.docx" etc., give them appropriate names, and do some additional cleanup as needed. Once I've verified & corrected the output, I close out the corresponding tab.

Before this I had tried some other solutions, including some of the web-to-epub extensions, but those tend to be spotty for the variety of content in the tabs I'm trying to save (unlike FFF which is so well-suited for fanfiction!). In particular, they often missed out graphics I wanted to keep, included extraneous content (ads, sidebars, etc.) from the page that I didn't want to keep, or omitted the URL from the original, which I like to keep in the document for reference. The Print Friendly extension, although not perfect in these respects, is the best I've found so far for this purpose.

All my results are in Word docs, which mostly suits my purposes, but I can also, of course, combine any that might go together, import into Calibre, and convert to epub to copy to an ereader.

I'd be thrilled if a better cobbler than I could come up with something more robust. I don't know how to use Github well enough to set up a repo of my own to share my code for anyone who wants to do a better cobble, but am open to sharing both my Python code & Word macro given a suitable venue.

Since this is off-topic for FFF, it would be good if someone who has the ability to set up & work with a repo could do so, and I'll gladly send it along (if it seems potentially useful to anyone other than me, that is!)

I'm also totally docker-illiterate, though I have it on my PC. It's there, but I have no clue what to do with it, and all of the info I've been able to find on the subject so far assumes far more knowledge than I have, and no info on where to acquire the info I'm lacking.