#clarifying

Tended: 31-12-2024

Bookmark Manager

I have a couple of ideas/projects that require getting details from a URL and displaying them with a nice UI "component". One of such ideas is having better links in the References section of each post. A native list is currently being used, but it would be nice to have the title of each link displayed without compromising on my writing experiencing.

Requirements

  • Build a simple service to power the References on articles
  • The frontend sends links
  • The service makes a request to each link and returns the following:
    • Title
    • SEO image
    • Short description
    • Favicon URL

The title will be the only parameter used in the first iteration of this feature.

Thought process

I'll be trying a different approach this time around. Rather than spending time doing a lot of research, I'll come up with a quick solution first, then research on areas of improvements. Here's a breakdown of a quick solution:

  • Make a request to the specified endpoint
  • Check for 2xx status code
  • Parse HTML document
  • Return the parsed content to the client

Implementation

I need an endpoint to make a request to the specified URL and return the parsed content. For a start, I need these functions:

  • FetchPageDetails(): A HTTP handler that initiates a request to the specified URL
  • parseHTML(): An internal function that processes the result of the HTTP request
  • parseFaviconURL(): Builds the full URL for the favicon if only the path is provided
  • isFullURL(): Check if a URL contains the host/domain name
Project setup
mkdir bookmark-manager && cd bookmark-manager
go mod init github.com/odujokod/bookmark-manager

With the project in place, I created the main.go ,bookmark_test.go and bookmark.go in the root directory.

Fetching the HTML

To validate my thought process, I wrote the test to fetch a page given a URL, checking to see if a 200 response is returned. Then I'm able to implement the feature to make the test pass:

Parsing the HTML

With the page now being fetched, I need to get the necessary details for the frontend. From the requirements, the necessary details can be found in the <head> tag. This makes parsing slightly easier. Over to the test:

bookmark_test.go
func TestParseHTML(t *testing.T) {
  // I can actually read this from the sample.html file
  sampleHTML := `<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
   <meta charset="UTF-8">
   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
   <meta name="description" content="Description goes here">
   <meta name="og:title" content="Go test">
   <meta name="og:description" content="Description goes here">
   <meta name="og:image" content="https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/google-s-logo/150/Google_Icons-09-1024.png">
   <title>Go test</title>
</head>
<body>
   <div>
      Hello world
   </div>
</body>
</html>`


12 collapsed lines
  htmlBytes := []byte(sampleHTML)


  got, err := ParseHTML(htmlBytes)
  if err != nil {
    t.Errorf("Unable to parse HTML: %v", err)
  }
  expectedTitle := "Go test"


  if got.Title != expectedTitle {
    t.Errorf("Expected: %s, got: %s", expectedTitle, got.Title)
  }
}

The test gives an insight into the implementation of the feature. I'll need a HTML parser that allows me walk through the HTML tree with ease. I found GoQuery, a library built on top of the net/html library, to handle the HTML parsing:

Install GoQuery
go get github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery

With GoQuery installed, I can now implement the parsing logic:

bookmark.go
import (
  // other imports
  "strings"


  "github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery"
)


type Bookmark struct {
  Title string `json:"title"`
  Description string `json:"description"`
  FaviconURL string `json:"faviconURL"`
  ImageURL string `json:"imageURL"`
}


func ParseHTML(html []byte) (Bookmark, error) {
  doc, err := goquery.NewDocumentFromReader(bytes.NewBuffer(html))
  if err != nil {
    return Bookmark{}, err
  }
  bookmark := Bookmark{}
18 collapsed lines


  title := strings.Trim(doc.Find("title").Text(), "\n ")
  bookmark.Title = title


  doc.Find("meta").Each(func(i int, s *goquery.Selection) {
    c, _ := s.Attr("name")
    value, _ := s.Attr("content")
    switch c {
    case "description", "og:description":
      bookmark.Description = value
    case "og:image":
      bookmark.ImageURL = value
    default:
    }
  })


  return bookmark, nil
}

Handling favicons

I considered using the favicon for the frontend component, so I decided to extend the response. Favicons can be specified with a fully qualified URL or a resource path. It would be easier to have a single representation for it. To do this, I need to check if the URL is a resource path or not. For a resource path, I simply append it to the main URL:

Refactoring

With the parsing logic in place, I can now refactor the fetch test and finalise the function implementation:

Router

A router can now be created to provide access to the client. In the main() function of the main.go file, I created and configured the server multiplexer:

main.go
package main


import (
  "fmt"
  "log"
  "net/http"
)


const PORT string = ":8081"


func main() {
  mux := http.NewServeMux()
  mux.HandleFunc("GET /fetch", FetchPageDetails)


  fmt.Printf("Server running on port: %s\n", PORT)
  log.Fatal(http.ListenAndServe(PORT, mux))
}

Usage

This site is built with Astro and Markdoc is used to manage content. Without going out of scope of this article, using the API is a three step process:

  • I built a Bookmark component in Astro
  • I added the .astro component to the Markdoc configured
  • In the References section, I wrapped the native list with the Markdoc/Astro component:
    {% bookmark type="default" %}
    - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies
    - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6265
    {% /bookmark %}

The References section below is the outcome of the first phase of this feature.

Going forward

  • How do I handle pages that have anti-bot?
  • How should I handle missing og:image?
  • Where should I deploy? Coolify? Or a general cloud provider?
  • How should storage be handled? DB or Cache or both?
  • I should use Goroutines to manage simultaneous requests from the client

References

Using HTTP cookies - HTTP | MDN

RFC 6265 - HTTP State Management Mechanism