
Show HN: A url-based API for images (my weekend project) - flippyhead
http://mebe.co/
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city41
Looks like you're filtering NSFW words over to a picture of a pipe?

An interesting spinoff would be memes. Something like
<http://mebe.co/goodnews/I_just_fixed_the_build.jpg> and it generates this:
<http://i.imgur.com/UR8Gbzb.jpg>

and yes memes are trite/overdone/whatever, but there's a lot of people out
there that use them.

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jkupferman
I actually just finished a project for super-simple URL based meme generation:
<http://memeifier.com/>

Your Professor Farnsworth example:
[http://memeifier.com/good_news/I_fixed_the_build/http:/i.img...](http://memeifier.com/good_news/I_fixed_the_build/http:/i.imgur.com/cux51CJ.jpg)

~~~
Falling3
Finally, something useful on the internet!

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tlrobinson
Suggestion: use CloudFlare to cache images at the HTTP layer so multiple
requests for the same URL never even hit your app servers.

CloudFlare + PaaS providers like Nodejitsu/Heroku is a great combination,
IMHO.

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RKearney
CloudFlare will close your account if you are only using it to serve up assets
like this unless you're paying for the $200/month Business plan.

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wizard_2
Please explain this, I'm not sure what kind of activity you're talking about.

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RKearney
Here's the article I read that lead me to write that comment.

[http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/02/how-much-traffic-is-too-
muc...](http://phoboslab.org/log/2013/02/how-much-traffic-is-too-much-traffic-
for-cloudflare)

Essentially the site was just one html page that had endless scrolling and
loaded hundreds of images. CloudFlare declared the site as being under a
"Layer 7 Attack" even though it wasn't.

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r4vik
seems a lot like jpg.to <http://optimus_prime.jpg.to/>

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Wait, since when could hostnames have underscores?

EDIT: Hey, IDNs seem to work! <http://café.jpg.to/>

EDIT 2: Or maybe not. <http://schlüssel.jpg.to/>

(Schlüssel means "key" in German. Google Image Search it and you get pictures
of keys. Search for "Schlussel", though, and you get that girl. So presumably
it searched for the punycode, something like --schlussel-blah.)

EDIT 3: Wait. the IDN for "Schlüssel" is xn--schlssel-95a. If I Google that, I
don't get pictures of Ms. Schlussel. It must be decoding it and stripping the
accents? That said, searching for schlssel does yield pictures of her.

EDIT 4: café is --xn-caf-dma. Google Image Search "caf" won't find cafés. Nor
will "--xn-caf-dma". So it must understand IDNs but strip or be accent-
insensitive

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nolok
They always could have underscore. But beware of browser issues (cookies will
fail in IE - at least pre 9 versions, for example).

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Well, thing is hostnames are supposed to only contain letters, digits and
hyphens, although other DNS names can contain underscores. So it shouldn't
work. You should be able to have a TEXT record with an underscore, but really
shouldn't be able to have an A or AAAA record.

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imechura
In this case optimus_prime is a sub domain. The actual DNS entry is likely
*.jpg.to so DNS does not have to know how to resolve the URI section with
underscore.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I'm not sure wildcard entries are actually a feature of DNS, I thought they
were something done server-side by the DNS server.

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mullr
Any particular reason you need to proxy the data through your own server?
Seems like a 302 to the original image url would be quite a lot easier and
more scalable.

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vanwilder77
A similar service (actually a bit smarter)
<http://speakthroughimages.herokuapp.com/generate.jsp?query=>[ your keyword]

(without the square brackets)

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joel_perl_prog
Review the copy on your blog page explaining the project. You have a sentence
with "use have" in it, and one sentence begins "Bring," where I think you
meant "Bing." =)

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noonespecial
Thats really cool. How bout letting me specify more params like size?

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flippyhead
Sure! To finish it quickly I kept it simple. Also, it's somewhat expensive to
get the results so cost is a factor.

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edouard1234567
Based on their "linear" pricing you'll get charged a penny every 5 requests.
If can charge less as your cache hit ratio increases...

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yock
Turns out yes, there isa picture of everything on the Internet.
<http://mebe.co/apple_space_monkey.jpeg>

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NameNickHN
I guess it's an early alpha version. :-)

<http://mebe.co/house-green-door-blue-window.jpeg>

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akennberg
There's a startup that's building an iOS app to talk/chat with pictures:
<http://tryrelay.com>

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underwater
I ran a very similar site a while back. The Bing API costs can get expensive
quickly. You probably want to cache the results.

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nikhilsaraf9
seems like a great idea! wondering if you could plug this into comments on
facebook where you could have your own such images embedded into text, like
custom emoticons (or make the like like an @mention where its a word and a
link to an image at the same time). Great stuff!

~~~
flippyhead
Yeah, that's a big part of the motivation. Though facebook doesn't render the
images inline, just pulls them out into a preview-type thing

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slig
Really nice! What API are you using?

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flippyhead
Yep, Bing. Mostly because of how it's priced.

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samirahmed
any chance you will opensource the code? or is it already up somewhere
(github)

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flippyhead
Sure. I need to clean up a few things first.

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oakaz
The pictures are really shitty. Please use Pinterest rather than Google
Images.

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tmchow
This is unique and useful. +1 for letting me specific size and aspect ratio

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bowerbird
love it.

is it ok to generate traffic aimed at it? maybe lots of traffic. (probably
not, especially at first, but maybe, so i thought it would be polite to ask.)

-bowerbird

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bkyan
What does mebeco stand for?

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flippyhead
Since my main use case was ease of use when using chat applications (like
Campfire), I wanted a super short domain. I was actually pretty surprised a
four letter pronounceable domain was available.

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level09
why the jpeg part ? would be nicer without adding that extension

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flippyhead
You can use any extension you want. Or none.

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pfig
One word: Scribblenauts mashup.

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tkahn6
I really would like to use this but it seems like it's getting hammered right
now.

Edit: seems to be working now

~~~
flippyhead
Sorry, you caught it mid-deploy. OK now.

