WebAnnotator

WebAnnotator is a Chrome extension that lets you augment articles with ratings and reviews/summaries.

Same in marketing talk: WebAnnotator is a social layer for the web ✨ that lets you rate articles and read community reviews directly in your browser.

WebAnnotator deals with articles only, not web pages in general.

Running the back end

Prerequisites

• Docker and Docker Compose installed
• A Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge)

Steps

1. git clone [email protected]:vdavid/web-annotator.git to clone the repo
2. cd web-annotator
3. docker compose up -d to start all services (Postgres, migrations, and backend)
   • The backend will automatically:
     • Wait for Postgres to be ready
     • Run database migrations
     • Start the API server on port 52181
4. curl http://localhost:52181/ping to test the server is running

Note: The default configuration uses simple passwords suitable for local testing. For production deployments, update the database credentials in docker-compose.yml and ensure proper security practices.

For local development, see CONTRIBUTING.md for a setup that doesn't use Docker.

Features

• Article detection: Automatically detects valid articles using Open Graph tags (og:type), JSON-LD schema, and URL path depth analysis.
• One-click ratings: Rate any article on a scale of 1–10.
• Instant context: The extension icon updates immediately to show how many ratings a page has and the average rating.
• Smart canonicalization: Ratings persist even if you visit the link from a newsletter or social media wrapper.
• Dark mode: The UI respects your system's light/dark preference.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome!

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Report issues and feature requests in the issue tracker.

Happy rating!

David