
Show HN: TechLetterApp – markdown to email service turns links into rich embeds - Swizec
https://techletter.app
======
Swizec
Hi HackerNews

I built TechLetterApp in 17 hours this weekend because I love writing my
newsletters but I hate making screenshots, ensuring images are small enough,
pasting code into carbon.now.sh, ... it's a huge time sink and super hard to
get just right.

Been wanting a service that does it for me and nobody was building one. So I
did

The #24hrstartup challenge was just the kick in the butt I needed.

This is gonna save me tons of time and I plan to keep adding more embeds.
They're super easy to add.

For the curious, TechLetterApp is built with

    
    
        - reactbulma for layout and basic styling
        - showdown for markdown parsing
        - Zeit for hosting
        - a single AWS Lambda function for screenshots
        - an AWS API Gateway to give the Lambda a REST API
        - it uses Chrome Headless to render & screenshot pages
        - Chrome Puppeteer to drive the virtual browser
        - GraphicsMagick to resize and optimize images
        - uploads all images to S3
        - click to copyToClipboard method from a hackernoon article
        - a hack to push code into carbon.now.sh from a random gist
        - Serverless framework to drive AWS deploys and packages
        - uses CheckoutPage to collect optional $2/export payments because I didn't want to faff around with Stripe myself
        - I used https://megatags.co/ to generate social sharing tags
        - and I tried and abandoned a bunch of other libraries on the way
    

Truly this project is a testament to how far The Web Platform has come that a
single person with a little help from the audience can build something like
this in just 17 hours.

️

