Review my app - clipng.com | Hacker News Reader

Review my app - clipng.com

6 pointshedgehog11 comments

Hello all,

A while back I got frustrated with the folders full of disorganized bookmarks I'd accumulated. After some thought about how to solve it I built an app that's working well for me. I'm soliciting feedback to see what I can do to make it work well for other people.

clipng is based on the following ideas:

- I'm usually only interested in part of a page (a particular insightful piece, code snippet, recipe, etc) - If I could collect the good parts all in one place then I could tag them and make them searchable.

To implement this I made the following:

- A bookmarklet that, when clicked, collects the current selection and some information about the current page (I call it a "clipping") - A site that handles tagging and indexing for your clippings (I used App Engine)

I'm still in semi-private testing but the following link will get you in (Google sign in, no need to create an account):

http://www.clipng.com/hackernews

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Enjoy, -Choong

(apologies if you saw the other post Friday, I neglected to read the fine print and so omitted this note)

Hey just checked it out and it does seem like a cool idea but when I logged in and then tried to use the bookmarklet (I just dragged it up to my book mark bar in ff3) I am getting errors-a-go-go. I just went to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus and hit "clip!"

uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsISelection.getRangeAt]" nsresult: "0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE)" location: "JS frame :: http://www.clipng.com/static/scrape.js :: <TOP_LEVEL> :: line 20" data: no] [Break on this error] undefined e.target.indexOf is not a function [Break on this error] if(goToURL && e.target.indexOf('http')>=0) {

Seem to be the main culprits.

Also I just realized it may have not been intended to work that way so I went back and just selected a paragraph of text and hit clip and it worked as expected. anyway hope that helps.

Thanks, I'll look in to it.

I think asking to link into my google account before offering anything at all is a really bad plan to get users interested.

At least a homepage explaining what you are doing, giving me an idea if I can trust you etc. is necessary.

I didn't go any further than the google login screen.

Fair enough, I definitely plan to add a public face to the site in the near future.

Regarding account "linkage", you might not be aware that App Engine apps can authenticate users using Google credentials but never see the credentials themselves and don't get any access to the rest of your data. Google was pretty careful about that one. From the developer's perspective I get an object that tells me your Google account ID (usually GMail address), display name, and (implicitly) that you have been successfully authenticated. Good question though.

Amazing. I was literally going to code something up just like this.

I use Google Notebook for this sort of thing (or used to)-- how does this compare to that? Is there a key difference I should check out first?

My memory from using Notebook is that you copied and pasted text and images into what was basically an online word processor.

You might think of clipng as half-way between Notebook and Delicious -- the stuff you pick out of a page is kept as a discrete unit inside clipng's database along with a link to the original. Injecting things is done via a bookmarklet so it's pretty quick and you don't need to visit clipng to do it.

So I think the key difference is that clipng is faster and less intrusive to use.

I'm talking more about the Firefox extension they have. Where you basically select text on the page (including images, etc) and then click Google's notebook button-- it will index that, store the snippet, etc.

http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/tour1.html

Interesting, I hadn't noticed that feature. Pretty similar then, although I used a bookmarklet rather than a browser extension. Personally I prefer the bookmarklet because it works in most browsers and I generally don't use FireFox.

This makes all of my random cutting/pasting into .txt files obsolete. Bravo!

Glad you like it!

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