Show HN: Link.fish – Boomarking meets web-parsing with archiving | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Link.fish – Boomarking meets web-parsing with archiving

link.fish

58 pointslinkfish34 comments

- Login form in chrome extension disappears when switching windows (i.e. for copying login and password from mail). And it loses data when disappearing.

- When posting lots of links it says something like "Only 250 links is allowed" and then drops all these links that I collected

- It shows "No entries found" for long time on front page, then suddenly entries appear

Thanks for your feedback!

About the disappearing window in the chrome extension I can sadly not do anything as far as I know. Is build in chrome. However if you want something that does not disappear you can right click on the fish-icon and select options. But normally logging into the extension is not really needed. If you are logged into link.fish the chrome-extension should find the data by itself and log itself in when you click the first time on the fish-icon.

Yes sorry for copy and pasting there is currently a limit of 250 URLs at a time. If you want to add more at once you would have to do that by uploading an HTML-bookmark file (like chrome exports to).

The "No entries found" thing is something I have on my to-do-list. Is really kind of confusing to see that message while the entries load. Sorry.

Also I still don't understand what features does it have. Is it just clone of del.icio.us, but with screenshots and some extracted text? Or it allows to build collection of items based on data extracted from websites? I don't see any data in links I collected, but it's probably because these pages don't contain any structured data recognizable by link.fish, and rules for such data are hard-coded.

The only way to get description of what this website does is to watch video, there's no text version. I hate videos, they're very synchronous and you have to turn off music to watch them.

Sorry, have to improve the landing page if that is not clear without video. The main idea about link.fish is that it extracts the data of website and lets you work with it (sort and filter). So if you bookmark an apartment you get bedrooms, bathroom, rent, ... you can display them as list or map and that across different websites. For movies you get actors, director, ... for recipes calories, ingredients, ... and so on. Additionally, can you collaborate with other people in real-time and it creates snapshots so that even if websites get deleted you still have the page saved.

To extract the data it uses the same what search engines use (schema.org) and for pages which do not support it own rules can be defined. That rules are not hard coded they can be created by any user. If a page does not have any data there is the button "Add Domain Support". There you can then select what kind of data should be extracted (like for example a "Product") and what properties (like name, price, image, ...) and then select the data on the website. That has to be done for all not yet supported websites but then it works for all such pages on that website for all users. Not technical people can also simply press "Data Missing?" then we get a message and add support ourself.

I saw this 77 days ago, what improvements have been made since then?

A lot of bug fixes, improved usability, added archiving feature, ....

It sounds awesome but what is the use case for me? It allows me to grab parts of a webpage as bookmarks? I thought Safari does this already (and no-one uses it).

Get a .com too (you have read all of Paul Grahams Essays right?); linkfish.com or something similar is fine - I particularly dislike the .fish it pheels very script kiddy to me.

Given that this isn’t a new idea can we all agree that User experience and design is going to be the way that this wins. Try to find someone awesome on Dribble or Behance to bring the code to life.

Finally adding “please sign up” at the end of your video came across as a bit desperate; it should be self evident at the end of any video that the person should sign up right! Maybe this will help: https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA

Apart from that congrats on launching. My product is going to be launching soon and it’s way more work than you ever think!

Thanks for your feedback!

link.fish is not about extracting a "part" of the website (in the sense of an image what I guess Safari does), it is really about the information (data). The idea is to make all web-information easily usable for everybody. So depending on what you bookmark different information should get extracted. So if you look for example for an apartment and bookmark one, it will get bedrooms, bathrooms, rent, image, location and so on. There are currently two main problems I want to solve. First bookmark managers do only display the title of the page and some kind of image and not what people actually want to see. And the second, that each website lives in its own world and the data from one page can not be used together with another one. Simple example. I go on vacation and want to display my room from Airbnb on a map with the sights I want to visit from Wikipedia or Lonely Planet and the restaurants from Yelp. Currently, that is totally impossible unless you have a lot of time and a CS degree.

The .fish domain is a thing which I get very different responses to. Some people really love it and some people not so much. One day I really have to look into that some more (when I have time and money). Right now the most important thing was that it is rememberable, short and cheap.

Depends on what part you mean is not new. Bookmarking for sure is not. ;-) The combination with the data extraction should be because did not find it anywhere else and that is why I created it. However totally agree on the rest! Will do that once I got some more feedback from users and I have money to pay somebody.

With the video agree. That was actually exactly the idea to seem needy and state something obvious. Should make a quite boring video a little bit funnier and different but did obviously not work that well ;-)

Yes is sadly always way more work than expected. So good luck on your project & launch. Thanks again for your help!

Hi, would love to get some feedback for the current beta version. Especially about usability, onboarding and the very new Data-Selector tool which allows tech savvy users to add support for currently not supported pages. The latter one gets currently just activated for HN beta users. Above all negative feedback would be very helpful as it will help me improve the most (as long as it is constructive). That could be generic things or reasons why you would currently not sign up. Thanks!

Doesn't seem like a bad idea, but I can't see that the additional features are worth the effort of adding an additional tool to the shed. Evernote and OneNote extensions both offer similar (albeit lesser) functionality.

Also, you shouldn't be hotlinking to clipped site's images, this could cause you a fair amount of embarrassment, should someone decide to replace images with your refer with say goatse.

Probably depends on what you are doing. If you only need simple bookmarking with some notes it is maybe really not worth the effort. However if you for example research something like an apartment, job, car, vacation. Or want to save movies, recipes, restaurants, ... and you want to sort/filter by any of the properties or you want to display pages with location information on a map, there is not much of an alternative right now. Sure, except if you count extracting the information manually, copy it into excel and setting pins by yourself on Google Maps. That takes literally hours without link.fish and a minute with.

Yes, the image situation is not great right now. Looking for a permanent solution is on my to-do-list.

I think you should really revisit the abilities of those two services they do far more than simply bookmark, they allow for content extraction, including images (which are then available across all your devices, offline.)

It also allows for in depth searching of that content, including performing OCR scanning of images, tagging, in the case of oneNote it allows you to create outlook task associated with them, export them to several formats.

Also in oneNote, you can also embed from repl.it, (think jsfiddle) which is how I handle any complex mapping needs.

Not to mention the countless other sites, that offer this sort of mapping functionality that you can then either embed, or screen clip the results of.

I'm not saying your product doesn't have value, but I think you underestimating what functionality is already out there.

Any open source alternatives?

Recommendations for open source alternatives or even similar closed products would be appreciated.

Alternatives which I can run on my own hardware (server etc.) is essential for me, because I have a decade-long history of weblinks which lives in my browsers and I need a "service" which will be available for longer than a few years.

I've long wanted something like this, basically as a sort of super-history search. Looks promising!

Thanks! Would love to get some feedback if it solves your problem and if not what needs improvement.

Looks great! Would be awesome if it would ignore 404, 403, etc. I tried importing some old bookmarks and a bunch of the sites don't exist anymore.

What do you mean with ignoring? That is more or less what it should do already. If a page returns 404 or 403 it should display that the page could not be added but still add all other ones. What happens for you and what would you expect to happen? Thanks for your help!

Perhaps the server isn't returning the proper status code (I didn't check), but I have seen plenty of pages come up with just a page not found or a 403 message.

Strange. Would be great if you can send me one or two examples that I can check that everything is working as expected. Thanks!

http://www.bartelme.at/journal/archive/button_devkit

http://www.getsatisfaction.tv/

http://dev.emcelettronica.com/installing-debian-arm-qemu

http://azadcreative.com/2009/04/how-to-separate-comments-and...

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/11/06/free-rss-icon-list

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/identify_google_people_...

http://wpcrowd.com/customization/comment-form-style-with-jqu...

Sorry for not answering the comments. Currently get always the message that I should slow down when I try to post. Will answer all as soon as I can.

The demo collections showcase some cool features! I'm interested in finding out what the Pro Account provides.

Thanks, great to hear! Still working on the Pro Version. Planned features include for example the creation of HTML snapshots (to also still have the links available after a page gets deleted), priority rendering (when the queue is full pro users will get priority) and some additional views and functionality. But that will evolve over time. What I am also very excited about is the possibility that people will be able to create own plugins which extend the possibilities of link.fish. Already now all the views on link.fish are built as plugins. That plugins could add custom views for specific use-cases (like for example a spreadsheet view of the entries or mind map style for tags) or additional functionality (like voting on links).

Is it not possible to import all my existing Chrome bookmarks? Seems like a good first step.

Ah yes, that is possible. Simply export your existing Chrome bookmarks as HTML. How it can be done is described here: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/96816

On link.fish you can then import them by clicking on the three orange dots right of the collection name. In the appearing menu choose the option "Upload Bookmark File". It will probably take a while depending on how many bookmarks you have because it has to visit each page. But after it is done you will receive an email.

Kudos, will look into it but,

I CAN'T BLINKING READ THIS. IT HURTS MY EYES.

IDK if it's my astigmatism, but the light grey text on white kills my eyes. Many people say the same thing for this kind of colouring. Please, please, just don't do it. It's annoying and physically hurtful.

Looks interesting. What are some things you're currently working on?

Thanks! Right now mainly working on getting the product totally production ready. No additional features for now. Once everything works perfectly want to add a pro account which offers additional functionality. For example, allows to also create HTML snapshots.

There is a typo in the title - Boomarking instead of Bookmarking.

Ah yes. Sadly did not realize it in time to be able to change it.

What is the archive format and can I export all my data?

Every collection can get exported as HTML bookmark file (the same Chrome uses) but that will only contain URLs, titles and tags. It is also possible to export all the URLs with all saved data as JSON or CSV. There is sadly no way yet to export the website snapshots (which are PNG). But that will also be possible in the future.

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