Newsletters have been a great source for my growth as an engineer. I’m subscribed in quite a few and I’ve even contributed to some. Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to sit down and read all the articles that piqued my interest. I’m always on the move for work or family matters or I will be doing chores at the house.
Making a podcast from the articles
Podcasts are the other source of learning things and keeping up with the latest trends. The fact that I can listen to them on idle time (commuting, chores) is why I keep on using them constantly.
A great feature that NotebookLM has is the creation of an audio file based on the resources you’ve provided. The fun part is that the audio is not a dry read through the gist of the resources. It is a rich dialogue between two characters much like a conversation in a regular podcast.
So one day I thought of combining the two and create a podcast from all the articles that I want to read but don’t have the time to. The result was good. Especially if I didn’t mix and match articles from different newsletters. What I didn’t like was the process. Each article had to be opened in its own tab since most newsletters don’t provide the direct link, then I had to copy the link, go to the notebook’s tab, paste it and repeat the steps for the next one.
What I wanted was to be able to right click on the newsletter’s link, save it to a list and when I’m done collecting links go to notebooklm and create a notebook from them.
Links in Bucket
I knew that this can be done through a chrome extension but I’ve never written one. Actually I’ve never written anything web related. In the past that would be the end of story. Nowadays, a couple of prompts and half an hour are all you need!
So, this is the initial prompt. It contains a quick summary of my need, a description of how I have imagine it work and the way it will used. Since I haven’t worked in this space before, I also asked the LLM to justify its decisions so that I will also learn a thing or two!
I am subscribed in various programming-related newsletter but I don’t have the time to read them all anymore. What I do have is a lot of commute time and a preferance into listening to podcasts.
So the use case is:
i want to manually open a newsletter, pick the articles that i want to read and for them save their link in a “bucket”. When ready I want to be able to dump that “bucket” of links in notebookllm and ask it to create a podcast for me.In more details:
we need to create an extension for chrome-based browsers that provides two things:
(1) when the user does a right click on a link the extension provides a “save to bucket” option that saves the link in a local storage. some times the link might not lead directly to the article because of attribution systems etc. the extension must save the final link that opens the article.
(2) when the user does a right click on a text field it provides a “dump from bucket” option that fills the text field with the saved links, separated by a newline, and empties the bucket.The extension is not intended to be upload to any store, i will be installing it from the file system.
Critical note: i am a seassoned software engineer but i’ve never build anything with javascript/typescript/bun. If possible use these technologies and provide detailed explanations of all the decisions in order to get familiarized with them.
After using the first outcome I quickly realized that I need to be able to remove links before dumping them:
we need to provide to the user the ability to remove links from her bucket. perhaps a list with all links and a small x or trash bin next to the link. if the number of the links is greater or equal to two then we need to provide a way to remove all them
If you want to take a look at the result you can find it here: https://github.com/le0nidas/links-in-bucket.
I’ve also included the plans that were created by the two prompts since they include the explanations that I’ve mentioned.
le0nidas 