Bookmarker Bookmarklet v2

Remember the days of Google Bookmarks? A handy little service that let you keep all your interesting web finds in one place. Well, that service has sailed off into the digital sunset.

I built an alternative for myself that saves my Bookmarks to a spreadsheet in Google Sheets using Google App Script - the Bookmarker bookmarklet.

It works by using a bookmarklet - a browser bookmark that runs a bit of JavaScript code when you click it. This code grabs the page's URL and title and adds it as a new row in your own copy of Google Sheets. 

This provides a centralized and flexible way to keep track of interesting articles and websites, offering the ability to add your own notes in the corresponding columns. The motivation behind this was to have all bookmarks in one location, accessible from any device, rather than being tied to a specific browser.

I enhanced the original code by prompting Gemini Flash within GitHub Copilot Chat to generate code to categorize a bookmarked URL. To make the URL categorization code easy to follow, I built a simpler sample.

Clicking on the bookmarklet will 

To use the new bookmarklet, follow these steps after reading how the initial version of the Bookmarker bookmarklet was built and deployed -

1. Copy this script to Google Apps Script. The program logic utilizes the Gemini 2.0 Flash API to scan the content of the web page represented by the URL provided by the user. A category is assigned from a predefined list of custom categories. To take advantage of this API, you'll need to obtain a free access key from Google AI Studio. 

2. Deploy it as a web app to get a unique URL endpoint that is generated by Google Apps Script. Copy that URL.

Deploying the code through the Google App Script editor

3. The copied endpoint URL will be used within the bookmarklet in your browser. Once set up, you can click on the bookmarklet to saved and categorize a bookmark-worthy page in your spreadsheet within Google Sheets for later action or reference. The current page's URL, title, category are added as a new row along with a timestamp.

Bookmarker bookmarklet v2 requires a bit of initial setup, but the result is a flexible and intelligent bookmarking system tailored to your needs.

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