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Show HN: In-memory micro web pages

meml.ink

5 pointsthrowaway4135 comments

Hey there HN, I’ve been working on a prototype over the past day or so that I’m calling MemLink.

The idea is that MemLink enables you to put content on the web with zero friction - no hosting, no deploying, no storing. You author the content, and it simply exists such as any other content asset that you could share.

Very much still rough around the edges. The editor supports dragging the blocks to reorder. Not all of the block types are hooked up yet. There is a custom shorthand syntax to each block metadata value to adjust settings like theming, positioning, and size. The plan is to polish up the authoring experience and abstract away the shorthand for UI controls.

Some issue seems to be:

1) distribution/lack of update mechanism. If you edit your site and someone has an old link, they don’t just get the update.

2) the links are ugly - works great with url shortening services though

3) there’s a size limit to the query param. Working on some dynamic data blocks that would allow you to pull content from other places such as a google sheet or bucket.

Any ideas or suggestions? Please let me know.

Thanks for checking it out!

It would make more sense IMO if you were distributing the runtime as open source(GPL?) so we can actually self host our "micro" web pages, if needed, and so they're much easier to replicate in another instance. Also to benefit from user patches to improve it further. Now there's a dependency on meml.ink being online and serving it, which makes it unusable for most people.

Great idea, and that is the plan. Within 2 weeks my goal is to have this open sourced and distributed as a parser module for use in any client or backend.

Don't think I'd ever share a >600 char link, looks like spam

Fair enough :D while most modern browsers support ~2-3kb of url data, these long links do break already in a lot of places like iMessage and Slack link parsing.

I’m planning on integrating with a url shortener service to shrink the urls by request in the editor, to address this issue.

Url shortener links still kinda look like spam though…

Another consideration is that they can be exported to QR code, or placed in links on other pages so you’re not ever really interacting with the full URL - like how you got there from HN. Alas, workaround and not an actual solution to your point.

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