
Show HN: Link.fish – Boomarking meets web-parsing with archiving - linkfish
https://link.fish/hn-beta
======
ungzd
\- Login form in chrome extension disappears when switching windows (i.e. for
copying login and password from mail). And it loses data when disappearing.

\- When posting lots of links it says something like "Only 250 links is
allowed" and then drops all these links that I collected

\- It shows "No entries found" for long time on front page, then suddenly
entries appear

~~~
ungzd
Also I still don't understand what features does it have. Is it just clone of
del.icio.us, but with screenshots and some extracted text? Or it allows to
build collection of items based on data extracted from websites? I don't see
any data in links I collected, but it's probably because these pages don't
contain any structured data recognizable by link.fish, and rules for such data
are hard-coded.

The only way to get description of what this website does is to watch video,
there's no text version. I hate videos, they're very synchronous and you have
to turn off music to watch them.

~~~
janober
Sorry, have to improve the landing page if that is not clear without video.
The main idea about link.fish is that it extracts the data of website and lets
you work with it (sort and filter). So if you bookmark an apartment you get
bedrooms, bathroom, rent, ... you can display them as list or map and that
across different websites. For movies you get actors, director, ... for
recipes calories, ingredients, ... and so on. Additionally, can you
collaborate with other people in real-time and it creates snapshots so that
even if websites get deleted you still have the page saved.

To extract the data it uses the same what search engines use (schema.org) and
for pages which do not support it own rules can be defined. That rules are not
hard coded they can be created by any user. If a page does not have any data
there is the button "Add Domain Support". There you can then select what kind
of data should be extracted (like for example a "Product") and what properties
(like name, price, image, ...) and then select the data on the website. That
has to be done for all not yet supported websites but then it works for all
such pages on that website for all users. Not technical people can also simply
press "Data Missing?" then we get a message and add support ourself.

------
overcast
I saw this 77 days ago, what improvements have been made since then?

~~~
janober
A lot of bug fixes, improved usability, added archiving feature, ....

------
andy_ppp
It sounds awesome but what is the use case for me? It allows me to grab parts
of a webpage as bookmarks? I thought Safari does this already (and no-one uses
it).

Get a .com too (you have read all of Paul Grahams Essays right?); linkfish.com
or something similar is fine - I particularly dislike the .fish it pheels very
script kiddy to me.

Given that this isn’t a new idea can we all agree that User experience and
design is going to be the way that this wins. Try to find someone awesome on
Dribble or Behance to bring the code to life.

Finally adding “please sign up” at the end of your video came across as a bit
desperate; it should be self evident at the end of any video that the person
should sign up right! Maybe this will help:
[https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA](https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA)

Apart from that congrats on launching. My product is going to be launching
soon and it’s way more work than you ever think!

~~~
janober
Thanks for your feedback!

link.fish is not about extracting a "part" of the website (in the sense of an
image what I guess Safari does), it is really about the information (data).
The idea is to make all web-information easily usable for everybody. So
depending on what you bookmark different information should get extracted. So
if you look for example for an apartment and bookmark one, it will get
bedrooms, bathrooms, rent, image, location and so on. There are currently two
main problems I want to solve. First bookmark managers do only display the
title of the page and some kind of image and not what people actually want to
see. And the second, that each website lives in its own world and the data
from one page can not be used together with another one. Simple example. I go
on vacation and want to display my room from Airbnb on a map with the sights I
want to visit from Wikipedia or Lonely Planet and the restaurants from Yelp.
Currently, that is totally impossible unless you have a lot of time and a CS
degree.

The .fish domain is a thing which I get very different responses to. Some
people really love it and some people not so much. One day I really have to
look into that some more (when I have time and money). Right now the most
important thing was that it is rememberable, short and cheap.

Depends on what part you mean is not new. Bookmarking for sure is not. ;-) The
combination with the data extraction should be because did not find it
anywhere else and that is why I created it. However totally agree on the rest!
Will do that once I got some more feedback from users and I have money to pay
somebody.

With the video agree. That was actually exactly the idea to seem needy and
state something obvious. Should make a quite boring video a little bit funnier
and different but did obviously not work that well ;-)

Yes is sadly always way more work than expected. So good luck on your project
& launch. Thanks again for your help!

------
janober
Hi, would love to get some feedback for the current beta version. Especially
about usability, onboarding and the very new Data-Selector tool which allows
tech savvy users to add support for currently not supported pages. The latter
one gets currently just activated for HN beta users. Above all negative
feedback would be very helpful as it will help me improve the most (as long as
it is constructive). That could be generic things or reasons why you would
currently not sign up. Thanks!

------
Meph504
Doesn't seem like a bad idea, but I can't see that the additional features are
worth the effort of adding an additional tool to the shed. Evernote and
OneNote extensions both offer similar (albeit lesser) functionality.

Also, you shouldn't be hotlinking to clipped site's images, this could cause
you a fair amount of embarrassment, should someone decide to replace images
with your refer with say goatse.

~~~
janober
Probably depends on what you are doing. If you only need simple bookmarking
with some notes it is maybe really not worth the effort. However if you for
example research something like an apartment, job, car, vacation. Or want to
save movies, recipes, restaurants, ... and you want to sort/filter by any of
the properties or you want to display pages with location information on a
map, there is not much of an alternative right now. Sure, except if you count
extracting the information manually, copy it into excel and setting pins by
yourself on Google Maps. That takes literally hours without link.fish and a
minute with.

Yes, the image situation is not great right now. Looking for a permanent
solution is on my to-do-list.

~~~
Meph504
I think you should really revisit the abilities of those two services they do
far more than simply bookmark, they allow for content extraction, including
images (which are then available across all your devices, offline.)

It also allows for in depth searching of that content, including performing
OCR scanning of images, tagging, in the case of oneNote it allows you to
create outlook task associated with them, export them to several formats.

Also in oneNote, you can also embed from repl.it, (think jsfiddle) which is
how I handle any complex mapping needs.

Not to mention the countless other sites, that offer this sort of mapping
functionality that you can then either embed, or screen clip the results of.

I'm not saying your product doesn't have value, but I think you
underestimating what functionality is already out there.

------
ofiner2
Any open source alternatives?

~~~
peternicky
Recommendations for open source alternatives or even similar closed products
would be appreciated.

~~~
xiconfjs
Alternatives which I can run on my own hardware (server etc.) is essential for
me, because I have a decade-long history of weblinks which lives in my
browsers and I need a "service" which will be available for longer than a few
years.

------
struct
I've long wanted something like this, basically as a sort of super-history
search. Looks promising!

~~~
janober
Thanks! Would love to get some feedback if it solves your problem and if not
what needs improvement.

------
michaelmior
Looks great! Would be awesome if it would ignore 404, 403, etc. I tried
importing some old bookmarks and a bunch of the sites don't exist anymore.

~~~
janober
What do you mean with ignoring? That is more or less what it should do
already. If a page returns 404 or 403 it should display that the page could
not be added but still add all other ones. What happens for you and what would
you expect to happen? Thanks for your help!

~~~
michaelmior
Perhaps the server isn't returning the proper status code (I didn't check),
but I have seen plenty of pages come up with just a page not found or a 403
message.

~~~
janober
Strange. Would be great if you can send me one or two examples that I can
check that everything is working as expected. Thanks!

~~~
michaelmior
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------
janober
Sorry for not answering the comments. Currently get always the message that I
should slow down when I try to post. Will answer all as soon as I can.

------
equalunique
The demo collections showcase some cool features! I'm interested in finding
out what the Pro Account provides.

~~~
janober
Thanks, great to hear! Still working on the Pro Version. Planned features
include for example the creation of HTML snapshots (to also still have the
links available after a page gets deleted), priority rendering (when the queue
is full pro users will get priority) and some additional views and
functionality. But that will evolve over time. What I am also very excited
about is the possibility that people will be able to create own plugins which
extend the possibilities of link.fish. Already now all the views on link.fish
are built as plugins. That plugins could add custom views for specific use-
cases (like for example a spreadsheet view of the entries or mind map style
for tags) or additional functionality (like voting on links).

------
fastball
Is it not possible to import all my existing Chrome bookmarks? Seems like a
good first step.

~~~
janober
Ah yes, that is possible. Simply export your existing Chrome bookmarks as
HTML. How it can be done is described here:
[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/96816](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/96816)

On link.fish you can then import them by clicking on the three orange dots
right of the collection name. In the appearing menu choose the option "Upload
Bookmark File". It will probably take a while depending on how many bookmarks
you have because it has to visit each page. But after it is done you will
receive an email.

------
gkya
Kudos, will look into it but,

I CAN'T BLINKING READ THIS. IT HURTS MY EYES.

IDK if it's my astigmatism, but the light grey text on white kills my eyes.
Many people say the same thing for this kind of colouring. Please, please,
just don't do it. It's annoying and physically hurtful.

------
JanKoenig
Looks interesting. What are some things you're currently working on?

~~~
janober
Thanks! Right now mainly working on getting the product totally production
ready. No additional features for now. Once everything works perfectly want to
add a pro account which offers additional functionality. For example, allows
to also create HTML snapshots.

------
smhenderson
There is a typo in the title - Boomarking instead of Bookmarking.

~~~
janober
Ah yes. Sadly did not realize it in time to be able to change it.

------
aw3c2
What is the archive format and can I export all my data?

~~~
janober
Every collection can get exported as HTML bookmark file (the same Chrome uses)
but that will only contain URLs, titles and tags. It is also possible to
export all the URLs with all saved data as JSON or CSV. There is sadly no way
yet to export the website snapshots (which are PNG). But that will also be
possible in the future.

