Sharkey

sharkey is a cute web-based personal bookmarking service.

• Bookmarking means it saves your links, allows you to tag them, arrange in categories and, most important of all, keep track of what you should visit later.
• Personal means you control your own data. Everything is stored on your computer and you can import/export/delete as you please. It is like the anti-social cousin of Delicious.
• Web-based means it runs on your browser. You don't need an internet connection, though! It doesn't mean you access a site to use it - it runs on your computer. It just happens that I prefer to make sites instead of designing windows and buttons and stuff.
• Cute means it has a nice appearance. It comes with lots of themes and you can even customize it with your own themes too.

Here's some screenshots for you:

As you can see, sharkey is a great tool for tab hoarders.

If you know me (which I bet you don't) the following sentence will seem familiar:

Nah, I won't close this tab... I might need it later. Let's open another one instead - Me, Always

Being like this for years leaves a nasty trail - lots of Firefox crashes, everything getting slow as fuark, computer-restarting paranoia, etc...
And I bet within those 400+ tabs there are some repeated.

Unfortunately most bookmarking services lacked one or another feature; some were beautiful but didn't had many things; others had 'em but didn't allow you to control your own data; others were super ugly and some were very complicated to install.

Well, sharkey is an attempt to gather the best things from them.

You should probably check out the live demo on saruman.link:5678.
Be warned, though, that since it's completely public it might have some nasty spam or even worse things.
But sharkey allows you to easily destroy all data so it shouldn't be that much of an issue.

Hey champ, you have to install it first.

You can easily fetch and install sharkey via Ruby Gems.
Look at that:

$ gem install sharkey-web

That command takes a while because it install all it's dependencies. You can also grab the gem file here if you want.

But, hey, if you run that command right now it will probably fail. That's because you need...

sharkey requires sqlite3 - and not just the library that comes with your distro, no; it needs the fancy development package.

If you're on Ubuntu/Debian the following command should suffice:

$ sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

Other systems may have different names but you get the picture - install SQLite!

If you're on Windows... Tough luck, I have no idea what you could do.
If you ever figure it out, please contact me so I can replace this shameful paragraph.
S-sorry, senpai.

Alright, so you've installed the dependencies and now you have sharkey!

Why don't you run it?

$ sharkey-web

This will create the sharkey's web server, launch it on the background and call your web browser. It should open a new tab (yet another...!) with that cute interface of the screenshots above.

To kill the process, simply run:

$ sharkey-web --kill

Anyway, go play with it!

Still reading? Go there, I can wait!

Back, already? ...okay

The rest of the document is just some boring technical talk, you should probably just stick with the Help session on the sharkey web interface.

Anyway, good talking to you. See ya!

Great, now that that they're gone, let's go to what really matters!

sharkey is essentially:

• A Ruby program;
• That is a web application, made with Sinatra;
• Encapsulated on a Vegas executable;
• That has a GUI made with HTML5/CSS3/Javascript;
• With a Bootstrap layout (and Bootswatch themes);
• Made dynamic and fluid with jQuery;
• And featuring with tons of plugins (see below);

Now, between you and me, this was my first attempt on developing a web application. It was a project to learn several web technologies and how to integrate them. But don't go around telling anyone this!

Besides the links above, I have to point out which tools I've used behind the scenes.

• tux: A console with direct access to Sinatra's internal stuff. I used it all the time to directly access the database and simulate some GET/POST requests.
• Mousetrap: a nice keyboard helper. Thanks to it one can use sharkey real fast through keyboard shortcuts.
• jquery.tagcloud, a simple plugin to create... tag clouds.
• Bootstrap Auto-Hiding Navbar - pretty self-explanatory. I like how when you scroll down the navbar hides and when you scroll up it pops up again.

While developing sharkey I bumped into several dead-ends. These are the people/links who helped me a lot:

• Sinatra Recipes: DataMapper
• Sam Stern: Making a Simple, Database-Driven website with Sinatra and Heroku
• wooptoot: File Upload with Sinatra
• Random Ruby Thoughts: Upload Files in Sinatra
• The Bastards Book of Ruby: Parsing HTML with Nokogiri
• Unheap: showcase of lots and lots of Javascript stuff

• When running this under development (with rake preview) the requests seems mother-fricking slow; that's because of shotgun and it's tendency to restart the application on each request.

The whole code is released under the MIT-license.

Check file LICENSE.md for details on what you can and cannot do with it.