
Show HN: I have a silly pet project, can I get some input? - andreigaspar
Last night I had a stupid idea, and wanted to check if it is technically possible. Well, it is!<p>In a nutshell: Emoji support for your website&#x27;s URLs.<p>yourwebsite.com&#x2F;contact - booring<p>yourwebsite.com&#x2F;:phoneemoji: - cool!<p>So I wrote a nodejs middleware that offers emoji support for your API, with 2 lines of code. (well if you count the installation 3 lines)<p>Here&#x27;s the project:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;slashemoji" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npmjs.com&#x2F;package&#x2F;slashemoji</a><p>I currently have support for the &#x2F;contact and &#x2F;about routes.<p>Can you give me some ideas of what other URLs to cover, and what emojis to link the routes to?
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swimmadude66
Rather than trying to exhaustively predict all the pages you could ever want,
maybe it would be smarter to build this as a middleware. That way you could
also support things like post requests, multiple emojis in a path, or paths
off of something other than root.

Additionally, you could allow your code to accept a mapping of emojis to
strings. That way people could use other emojis without hammering you to
support them, and the same emoji could be used to represent different strings
on different sites.

Overall I think its a cool idea, but if I were you I'd be worried about the
huge amount of work to extend this functionality as-is if it got popular.

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andreigaspar
Solved it! Routes can be associated with simple one liners now.

For example: emoji.set(':emojisymbol:', '/whatever/route/here')

Thanks again for the input!

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swimmadude66
Awesome, looking forward to trying it out!

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andreigaspar
I created an updated package with the ability to customize your emojis, and
implemented it into our site (there are some examples in the description):
[https://www.npmjs.com/package/emoji-
express](https://www.npmjs.com/package/emoji-express)

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tanmaydesai89
Sharing a demo url would help.

pages you can cover: careers/jobs, pricing, status, faqs, blog, terms of
service, privacy policy.

Hope this helps.

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andreigaspar
Yeh that makes sense, I'll put it on a server.

Thanks for the suggestions, these are awesome! I'll add them like this
(because I can't use spaces): /careers /jobs /pricing /status /faq /blog
/terms /privacy

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tanmaydesai89
Glad I could help.

I had a question though - why not provide a mapping option to slug for better
customization. (pardon - my programming knowledge is very limited)

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andreigaspar
That is an interesting point, I honestly didn't think about it. The initial
thought was to automate everything, so no code has to be written, just a
simple import - but this comes at the cost flexibility and customization.

I'll try to figure that out as well for 2.0, maybe there's a user friendly way
to customize it

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tonteldoos
Scratched an itch, simple idea, elegant implementation, and useful! I love it
:)

~~~
andreigaspar
Thanks I'm really glad to hear that!

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gitgud
Cool idea, I think it should be mobile only though. Emojis dont show in my
chrome browser on PC, as coloured icons that is.

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andreigaspar
Thanks! Well the old routes are still kept intact, so it can be accessed
through let's say yoursite.com/contact - but if you choose to use an emoji you
get the contact page too :D

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XZz_Yassin
Cool idea, I like it

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WheelsAtLarge
I second that.

This is a great way to universalize the standard website footers such as About
us, privacy, contact us and sitemap

~~~
andreigaspar
That's a pretty creative input, I didn't think about it from the perspective
of universalizing these routes.

I built it as a tongue in cheek project, but I'm starting to get pretty
excited about polishing it.

