Dev

To my surprise, building a Chrome Extension is technically quite straightforward. You need: A bit of HTML (the popup UI) A bit of JavaScript (your logic) And a $5 one-time fee to publish in the Chrome Web Store The Chrome Extensions API is pretty minimal, but it covers all the basics: ✅ You can persist data (e.g. auth tokens) ✅ You can query open tabs, grab the current URL ✅ You can even inject JavaScript into pages — though this last bit triggers stricter review from Google, especially if you request broad access (like "<all_urls>"). ...

You can talk about autonomous #AIAgents roaming the web and performing all kinds of tasks 'just as a human would' as much as you like, but technically, some of the very basics are still lacking. For example, there is no free, easy-to-use, off-the-shelf solution for extracting web content. Here’s what I mean: Think of poketto.me as a very basic 'agent': you tell it to save a URL, and then it talks to the website 'on your behalf' to access its content. For this use case, the Newspaper3k Python library is pretty good: it teases out structured metadata, but occasionally misses basic things like the content language. To retrieve the actual content, Trafilatura ( https://github.com/adbar/trafilatura) appears to be the best option at the moment. However, even that doesn't work well with all sites. For edge cases, I actually had to fall back on parsing the raw HTML myself using Beautiful Soup ( https://beautiful-soup-4.readthedocs.io/en/latest/). (And yes, I’m sending that through an LLM later to streamline the content so all the tiny formatting issues Trafilatura introduces get smoothed out again.) ...

Remember when I talked about “Sign in with Google?” That works really well on the web, but: Once you’re wrapping your web app into a native mobile app, things turn very ugly very soon. In a hosted WebView, Google won’t let you render the sign in button to begin with – unless you override the WebView’s user agent string. After that, you’re still screwed if you rely on the default sign in workflow as this would open a popup window from which the user then can’t navigate back into your app. ...