About Shelv

When my wife and I first met, we'd send each other essays to read. We once spent two hours on the phone talking about David Foster Wallace's piece on Roger Federer. Now our reading links get buried in a chat cluttered with grocery lists and paperwork reminders.

I built Shelv to give those links a home.

How to use it

Create a shelv, invite someone with the invite link, and start adding articles. Paste any URL—Shelv extracts the content into a clean reader view. Highlight passages, mark articles as read, and discuss in the comments.

How it's built

Shelv is a Next.js app with a PostgreSQL database hosted on Neon. Content extraction uses Defuddle, an open-source library from the Obsidian Web Clipper team. Inline highlights are powered by mark.js. Most of the code was written with Claude Code. In the future, I'd like to add a browser extension for easier capture.

This is a small side project. Feedback welcome: humzah[at]stanford.edu