I had a Sunday on my hands and a phone with 50gb of ‘System Data’ I ’ve tried the easy options found online and suspected my banks of unclosed safari may have been contributing. but I didn’t want to loose all that work compiling articles I didn’t have time to read. SO decided I wanted them somewhere I should run an llm against them to filter and sort into buckets.
Raindrop.io is a cross platform bookmark tool, but after installation and account creation I realised there is not a clean way to send all open tabs to it, and even the safari extension can only handle a page at a time. fortunately safari does have the feature to copy all open links (this is done either from long holding tab groups or the name of the open tab count if you’re not in a named tab group)
Once I have my links in the clipboard I needed to get them into raindrop (despite letting my down on the initial bulk import goal, I didn’t want to waste time re-litigating the ideal cross platform bookmarklet tool) they do have a file import which takes lists of links, so used Drafts as I was sure is would have a day to save to a a text file directly on the files app, bypassing and apple app sandboxing games.
I has the flow. Bear in mind every 3 months or so I would have ’too many open tabs’ create a new tab groups and start again. so at this point I had 8 or so named tab groups. So I spend the next 20 minutes long holding tab groups, pasting into drafts and importing into raindrop then closing the group as my mark of completion, all in all I had just north of 1700 iPhone tabs in a place I could tidy them.
You may notice I’m about three thousand shy of the title, well my AI empowered backlog crusade was not done, my youtube watch later list was next on the chopping block. this was both more simple and much more of a headache due to the tangent I led myself on.
n8n is a platform for building pipelines for data in theory it’s low code drag and drop and simple to pipe together all sorts of wacky workflows, like Zapier or IFFT before they degraded their free tiers, and hopefully perpetually in that pre-suck state thanks to self hosting! it already has in integration with raindrop to both import and export so I suspected this might be a decent platform for sorting in the middle too, and it claims to have youtube integration, so my watch later could be sorted along the way.
After 2 hours of Tailscale SSL certificates and google dashboard I had a way to securely share my youtube watch later playlist using Oauth. Watch later playlists are private and highly secretive don’t you know. this is when I discovered the n8n youtube get items from playlist node could not support watch later playlists, and a bit of hunting for custom alternative nodes was fruitless.
This searching did lead to an altogether simpler and EU sanctioned solution in google checkout. Exploring just playlists took 2 minutes before I received the email with a download link to a csv. The format is a little funky bur perfectly serviceable to process to get into raindrop.
It was as this moment, with all my precious links away from the boxes that limited my ability to bulk process them that I lost all conviction to extract value from them. I have my 3500 Youtube videos and my 1700 phone links and no guarantee that the signal to noise is even worth the tokens to process, But I have them they are in a place easy and ready to be picked up again and the opportunity to not collect them again.
All that’s left now is to extract my desktop’s old OneTab links,and to clear out the watch later list, which without youbute providing a remove all buttin is relying on slight sketchy chorme extensions that automate clicking ‘remove from watch later’ one at a time, at the rast of one video every second or so, but better that using an ai I suppose.