Enhanced modular bookmarking (and more) for Newsboat or Newsbeuter

A while back, I wrote some scripts for the (now unmaintained) Newsbeuter console RSS reader. Luckily, it got forked into becoming Newsboat and is still being actively maintained. And so I’ve updated my script and made them a lot more useful.

Originally it got called “newsbeuter-dangerzone” because that’s what GitHub suggested, and, well, I just imagined yelling “Lana!” a whole lot. While Newsbeuter is unmaintained, I don’t want to change repositories, so we’re just calling it “Dangerzone” now.

Because I’m a nerd.

Anyway, what does it do? It lets you share articles from Newsboat/Newsbeuter via as few – or many – ways as you like. In fact, it doesn’t even need those RSS readers – it will work with anything that passes an URL as the first argument and a title/description as the second argument.

It’s perhaps easier to see it in action:

Animated gif showing DANGERZONE at work

Here, you can see me select a bookmark, and then choose to send it to Mastodon and to capture it as a PNG. You can choose one (or as many as you like) options by using the TAB key.

As you can see, there’s already quite a few figured out already – Twitter, Mastodon, saving as HTML/ PDF/ PNG/ JPG, opening in a GUI browser, sending it to a Shaarli instance, submitting it to the Wayback Machine, and more.

Because it’s meant to be very customizable (and hopefully somewhat proof against bitrot), you may have to edit a file here and there to get it completely set up, but if you’re using a console RSS reader… well, you know how to edit a config file and read a README.

You can find dangerzone (including links to the source code at GitLab and my personal repo) at https://uriel1998.github.io/newsbeuter-dangerzone/

Featured Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash