Week 397 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2025-06-05.
Following on from last week's post on how bad bookmarking is on the web, I got my web service into a decent state. The UI at least lets me see what I've bookmarked and it does just enough.
The next job was to integrate and the best way for me was to create a simple Shortcut that I could call on for any URL.
This was not simple.
First, the URL input appears to try to pass the entire page. I wanted to "expand" the URL, which to Shortcuts means to cut out the URL forwarding services (t.co, bit.ly etc...) and to remove common identifiers like utm_source. I then wanted to base64 encode the URL so that there's some obfuscation during transfer. This did not work, the base64 encoding was applied to the entire HTML body of the response. Luckily only to the response, and not the resulting JavaScript nightmare on a lot of social sites now, but it was a task that would lock Shortcuts completely.
I tried assigning the URL to variables or to break the into parts, but then re-assembling was non-trivial. The answer was to put the URL into a Text action which I could then reference later on. It was so much harder than it should have been and ate up way too much of my time. Just let me choose if I want the URL (which is what it says on the tin) or the URL response! I'm happy to configure the inputs and actions but it really isn't obvious what actions will treat the URL as a string of text or as a hint to get fetch the resource.
I have a working Shortcut now, which I'm happy with but it does prompt for permissions way too often. If I go to edit my Shortcut now, the Privacy tab is unscrollable but also unusable because there have just been so many requests for what it can and can't use!
The experience is... fine. I could build something in SwiftUI to reduce the pain from day to day usage, but the use case is too limited when it's a personal project. But maybe that's another reason to open source the back-end?
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