Show HN: Fetchful - Fetch page information previews from any link | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fetchful - Fetch page information previews from any link

fetchful.com

8 pointstjlivesey14 comments

Great idea!

I see:

  Could not generate a preview, please check the URL is valid and   does not redirect then try again.

It seems like the service is down, so the error message is probably incorrect. That being said, you should follow redirects, this is a no-brainer. You can make HEAD requests to save bandwidth. Also, this one is minor, the enter key should submit the form.

It does follow redirects but I think javascript redirects are causing a problem occasionally, still a couple of issues I need to work out. The occasional url does not get parsed properly for some reason which is probably causing this error.

Very cool, question: How do you know what's the official image of the page? I fetched google.com and it seems to "extract" the right image. However I don't see anything special in the <img> for google.com.

A few different ways, it will favour the open graph image or meta 'image_src" tags if there are any. If not, it will take all the image tags on the page and then decide what's relevant based on the correct size and position on the page which is usually fairly accurate.

Nice job!

Cheers :)

Is there a paid plan? I'd love to use something like this, but before I build on it, I'd like some assurance it will stay around for awhile.

No paid plan at the moment, but if was something that people were genuinely interested in using, I would consider a (very cheap) paid plan. It will be sticking around 'as is' for a good while at the very least though.

how does this compare to embed.ly?

It's similar, but I would like to think it's slightly faster due to it's simplicity. Also, as far as I can tell, embedly is not so good at finding relevant information from sites with no proper image and description metadata. It's really just a small project that I wanted for myself and thought others might find useful as well.

This is great. Thank you!

No problem, do let me know if you decide to use it at all, I would be interested to see. I'm no javascript expert so my jquery examples with tooltips etc are pretty basic, I'm sure it could be used for more interesting things.

Can you add support for multiple URLs?

It would be possible but I'm not sure that would be that much more useful than just sending a separate request for each url. If there were lots of them, they could just be looped through. Also, with lots of urls, the response could start getting quite slow. Maybe I'm missing the point of what you meant?

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