A Home-Cooked App to Share Links with Lisa

When Lisa and I were in the first flush of new love, Mondays would see a flurry of texts from me to her, a deluge of sparks and inspirations, pointers and exclamations, all to fill the hole that was left when she and L. returned home to Brighton after a weekend together.

It turns out that text messages are the worst way to run an intra-couple social network: shared objects of fascination get intermixed with requests to pick up milk and warnings about icy sidewalks.

Lisa already has an RSS feedreader purring along on her iPhone, so I realized that I had all the pieces of a solution to this: I could build her a custom RSS feed of things I wanted to share with her, liberating them from the prison of SMS. 

Here’s how I did it.

First, I built a very simple MacOS Shortcut:

This Shortcut—which automagically works on both MacOS and iOS—receives a URL from the “Share Sheet” and sends it to to a URL, as JSON, on a webserver, and then displays a notification that it happened.

In practice, using this from a browser is as simple as clicking the “Share” icon, selecting Shortcuts, and then selecting “To Lisa.”

On the server side, I have a PHP script that does the following:

1. Receives the JSON from the POST, and looks for the ‘url’ payload.
2. Grabs the page in question, and uses readability.php to turn it into a simple, stripped-down readable chunk of text.
3. Adds the URL, the page title, the body text from Readability, and the current date, and adds a record to an SQLite database.
4. Dumps all the URLs in the SQLite database into an RSS feed, which Lisa has subscribed to in her feedreader.

It’s 130 lines of pretty simple PHP.

On Lisa’s end, the feed looks like this:

This all took about an hour to put together, and I’m proud of my home cooking.