[SOLVED] "Add to Airtable" browser extension

[Bill_Doerrfeld]

I’m considering Airtable for information gathering as I browse the Web. One tool I currently use is Trello along with the “Add to Trello” extension for chrome and safari which nicely adds the URL and title for the page I’m viewing and creates a new card/record in a specific Trello board and list both of which can be specified within the extension. Simple and powerful. I could only convert to airtable if I had something similar.

[Katherine_Duh]

We’ve definitely been thinking about something like this, and there are a lot of different potential directions in which an Airtable browser extension could go.

If there were an Add to Airtable extension, how do you think you would use it? Would you be using it to save interesting internet articles to read later, to bookmark recipes, to do academic research, etc., or something else? How would you envision it looking? Would you want it to function pretty similar to the Add to Trello extension (in which the web page you’re on gets added as a record to a table in a base)? Or would you want something more like Pinterest, in which you can clip images to save them for later?

[Stephen_Bateman]

Just to jump in, this would be my workflow

• create a form in AirTable
• go to the extension and select which form I want to use when I click on it.
• Ideally, I could collect some info from the page (title tag, URL) and time/date.
• That would auto-send to the form.

So…Pinterest-style I guess. :winking_face:

[Lisa_Peck]

I would use it more like adding a new record, similar to Trello, or a new task addition, similar to Omnifocus or 2Do, etc. Any plans to incorporate it? It would be nice to have as a browser extension and also as a share extension for ios.

[Anvisha_Pai]

I would love this as an applicant tracking tool to create or update applicant records from emails that we exchange.

[Hashim_Warren]

I have a base for marketing projects, and a table for inspiration.

I’d use the bookmark to quickly share links to stuff that inspires me

[Jeff_Appareti]

I would also be very interested in this. I would mainly use it to add new records to tables.

For example:

• Add recipes I want to try to my recipe base. I imagine it working like this: I would click on the extension in the browser, it would ask me which base and table to add to, then I would select the fields that correspond with the web page (e.g. Title of page > Recipe Name, Photos > Recipe Photo, URL > Recipe URL)
• Add craigslist posts, especially for apartment hunting. Similar to the above. It would parse the data onthe page (listing title, price, photos, description) and add to the appropriate fields.

[HammerOz]

• 1 . I imagine web clipping to a generic airtable inbox, then when in airtable, I can grab the url from any base or table. “Create new record in this table from this web clip” or perhaps while in a url field you can click “insert from web clipboard”. The alternative is to use a clipboard app like Copied.

[Joerg_von_Loebe]

An “add to Airtable” extension would turbocharge your application.

In my case, at home I would use it to store new articles about fitness and nutrition. At work it would serve to catch new marketing ideas from the web, gather technical information related to the products we develop, store activities, press releases and posts by our competition, suppliers, customers, etc.

I currently use Evernote through their “Evernote Web Clipper” web browser extension and their “send to Evernote” windows extension. Both are very neat and intuitive to use. Having such a thing for Airtable would be supreme.

[Alex_Bernson]

I think that you could probably build out most of the use cases people are talking about here with a little bit of smart zapier glue using their Push chrome extension:

The Zapier Blog

Introducing Push by Zapier: A Universal Chrome Extension for All Your Apps

When you use Zapier to integrate your favorite apps, everything runs in the background–a well-oiled automation machine. But what about those workflows that you think of randomly or want to trigger manually? For example, making a quick invoice...

It’s pretty darn cool, arbitrary (text) fields entry into arbitrary action, which you could use to create a record with XYZ, or search XYZ record and update with whatever.

[Borja_Morales]

Hi, I did create a Chrome Extension for sending links to an AirTable DB. I was researching to buy a new TV Box and used it to store all the models I saw while browsing.

The behaviour is as follows:

• The extension has to be configured with the DB Api url and API Key. I haven’t found any way of auto discovery for this.

• Clicking in the extension button will create a new record in the DB with the information:

  • Url for the current site.
  • Title of the current site
  • A thumbnail with the biggest image it can be found in the site.

So the DB is requried to have this 3 columns in order for the extension to work.

In the other hand while browsing, the extension would compare all the links in the current site with the urls stored in the DB. For the ones found it will create put a sticky note indicating that that url is already in the DB.

I have the extension locally, I can submit it to to the chrome store if anyone find it useful.