To go back and solidify my vanilla JavaScript knowledge I decided to build out a bookmarks tool. In particular I wanted to make my bookmarks more visible and navigable, it has particularly annoyed me the way chrome does not have a directly viewable interface for them. So, using JS, SCSS, HTML and node.js I went about creating something I wanted to see.

To cover the most widely used file formats possible I found ways to parse and visualize exported html, Chrome json bookmark files and Mozilla jsonlz4 files. Originally I wanted the tool to auto read either the Mozilla or Chrome files depending on the browser in use. However, I soon came to realise that to do so you would have to access the users hard drive and for obvious security reasons this is not possible. Or is at least legally frowned upon! So, with the use of a couple of JavaScript packages I refactored it so the user could choose a file via a file input element. The file then gets uploaded to the express server via Multer and read by the corresponding parser depending on the file extension.

Ultimately I created a version of what I had set out to accomplish and learnt a fair few things along the way (Multer, file uploading and limitations). But now I have a much more visible and navigable way to utilise my collected resources and references in my bookmarks. Hurrah!!