

Show HN: Fetchful - Fetch page information previews from any link - tjlivesey
http://www.fetchful.com

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rudle
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.

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tjlivesey
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.

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thepumpkin1979
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.

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tjlivesey
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.

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thepumpkin1979
Nice job!

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tjlivesey
Cheers :)

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garbowza
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.

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tjlivesey
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.

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saiko-chriskun
how does this compare to embed.ly?

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tjlivesey
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.

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lightyrs
This is great. Thank you!

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tjlivesey
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.

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lightyrs
Can you add support for multiple URLs?

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tjlivesey
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?

