I spend all day long slinging URLs around. Mostly, when I copy and paste a URL it’s treated as a string of characters. But you and I know that a URL is heavy. A URL is a representation of a blog post, or a product I want to buy, or a hike I want to go on, or an Airbnb I’m going to book.
URLs are also useful. Opening tabs and browsing the web is essential to task completion. Tab sprawl is a symptom of a basic task: web foraging1.
In short, I spend a lot of both professional and personal time on the web – grabbing, saving, sending and bookmarking URLs.
What if we could work with URLs in a way that embraced their weight. That was designed for web foraging?
Say hello to ⚡ Electric Tables. It’s a little research project and prototype to explore the idea of structured data, personal databases and web as texture.
It’s pretty simple. It looks something like this:
Electric Tables works by taking a URL, extracting some key data and adding it to a table.
It works by using a bookmarklet and local storage. So there’s no login and no database in V0.1.
Simply click it on a page you want to save and you’ll see something like this:
Notice how it automatically extracts basic information like title and image? Neat. When we try it on a Target page for example notice how it grabs the price and review score automatically?
Or when we try it on a recipe page it automatically extracts the ingredients into a list:
You can change which table it saves to in the dropdown at the top (it defaults to the last used). And you can edit or add fields of data by adding rows.
Try it yourself by dragging this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar:
