Intro
Today's edition will be briefer as I'm on a visa-run in Penang (Malaysia). I'm actually writing this from the public bus to the airport. I still got more than enough interesting side projects for you to check out. This time with these projects:
- Is my website ready for launching? Find out with websitelaunchchecklist.com
- “Close my tabs“ to manage your tabs smarter
- “metomic“ - A smart GDPR consent manager
- “NetflixHangouts“ to watch Netlify at work
- See how you move around your town using your Google data
- Read faster with this
- Open source library to securely share files
As every week: if you got any feedback please get in touch. Let's get started with some neat side-projects:
Make sure your website is ready to launch with websitelaunchchecklist.com
Planning on launching a new site soon? Check you WebsiteLaunchChecklist.com for the top things you should tick off before you launching officially. You can tick off the items on the website and clear your data later for the next project. By Fraser Boag.
Ready to launch?, Checklist
Drowning in tabs? “Close my tabs“ can help!
Having too much going on in your browser and getting unproductive over the number of open tabs? “Close my tabs“ by Kamban the Maker can help you to get it back under control. It allows you to select and close tabs by the last-access time.
Productivity, Browser extension
“metomic“ - A smart GDPR consent manager
I'm sure everyone has seen the cookie warnings and banners on several occasions. Richard Vibert and his team have built a smart consent manager for websites. You add a piece of JavaScript and it tracks cookies and lets people decide if they like to accept it or now. You can get started under https://landing.metomic.io.
GDPR, consent management
Watching Netflix at work? Check “NetflixHangouts“
Stuck in 9-5 and can't get out? NetflixHangouts.com changes the looks of your Netflix into a site looking like a Google Hangouts meeting call.
Netlify, Hangouts
See how you move around your town using your Google data
... has built a side-project to visualize your location data as a heatmap. The data used is coming from what Google already collected about you. This requires to be tech-savvy and basic knowledge of Python doesn't hurt. The project source code is licensed as open source and can be found on GitHub under jacopofar/location-data-to-heatmap.
Location data, Mapping, Open Source
Read faster
If you just start out with reading it can be time-consuming. Even many seasoned readers are able to increase their reading speed by leaving out words or jumping sentences. One of the more simple methods is jumping from word to word faster. By displaying only one word at the time, giving it a predefined time and jumping to the next word automatically you can increase your reading speed significantly. This what read shit faster by Sakun does. You paste any text, set your speed and off you got to read the text at a much faster pace. It might take a few tries to get the pace right, but definitely worth a try, if you are reading a quite a bit. There is also an extension for Chrome available by now.
Productivity, Reading
File sharing for devs
Have you got asked for a screenshot or the latest version of that file again? Emailing files or sending them via a messenger was a constant task before Google Docs. By now the issue is less painful, but the basic problem remains: how do I send a file fast and temporary without going to a website and uploading it manually? “Share“ by Zack Scholl is an open source library which allows you to securely share files directly from your command line. After installation simply run share filename.abc and get a download link directly, without accessing any websites. Files are kept depending on the file size — the larger the file the short it will be kept. Paths are permanent as the file hash is used as URL.
File Sharing, Developer Tools
Are your browser extensions safe?
Browser extensions have by nature more access to your data. Often the permissions are granted without much thinking and malicious extensions might end up collecting and sending your personal data off. To avoid this you use extension monitor to keep an eye on the extensions and weed out bad extensions quicker. More details can be found in this blog post. It's a platform providing you a background screening of installed extensions. Currently, the aim seems more big companies and government organizations but a customer-focused version of this project would be great.
Browser Extensions, Privacy, Security
Closing words
If you like this collection of side-projects you might also like the previous three editions:
As usual, I'd be very happy if you share any project mentioned with others who might be interested. Same goes naturally for this collection itself. Here are some handy links for Twitter and Facebook if you like to share this post 🙏️
Same as the first and second edition the cover photo was shot by Ashwin Vaswani. It's available via Unsplash. Thank you!
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