Show HN: prldr.com, preloading the internet, my weekend project.

by japetheape • 16 years ago

10 11 16 years ago

japetheape5• 16 years ago

prldr.com let's you create lists of links and preloads those lists for you.

It's got a very basic API, so you can use it to create and update your own lists.

I can think of multiple use cases for it. For example: load your twitter feed, scrape the links and display them, load all your rss feeds and display them, open up all links off a frontpage, to preload them.

What do you think? What kind of things must I add to make it useful for you? You might just not like it, because of the iframe technique used, just ignore it then, it really is a very hackerish tool and not meant to be more than that.

It currently works best in Chrome/Safari.

e1ven• 16 years ago

It's a neat tool, but I don't know how often I'd use it. Pre-loading the info is neat for twitter, but the additional second or two it takes to copy/paste the info into your app seems like it'd be longer than just waiting for all the pages to load.

Middle-clicking and background opening them in new-tabs is easy enough for me.

japetheape5• 16 years ago

There's an API to make the twitter link fetching possible. Was curious how people might use it, think there are lots of posibilities. API is very very simple, just 1 RESTful controller. Hope there will be someone who can come up with a cool application that makes use of it.

http://prldr.com/pages/api.html

zsouthboy• 16 years ago

Actually, I like it. API seems simple too. I have a forum where I like to go through every single new post; would be useful for this (right now my solution is middle clicking a ton of tiny "arrow representing updated posts" images).

Definitely needs a STOP button, though; stopping the current page using my browser didn't stop it from preloading.

Works fine in Opera, by the way.

japetheape5• 16 years ago

You're right, will implement this.

brianwillis• 16 years ago

This would make a great alternative to an RSS reader. I've always had two problems with RSS:

1) Design has value. RSS readers strip the aesthetic qualities out of a web page and leave you with sterile text. Given the way some websites have been designed this is sometimes a good thing, but at other times I feel like I'm missing part of the experience.

2) Some sites only offer summary-only RSS feeds for various reasons.

Prldr could solve both of these problems really nicely. Consider expanding the project to allow uploading an OPML file, and tracking what users have read.

japetheape5• 16 years ago

Exactly! The same problem I always had with RSS readers. Think I am going to implement this in a few days.

japetheape5• 16 years ago

done, read about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646290

dman• 16 years ago

Warning about closing the tab seems excessive.

techbio• 16 years ago

I like this. I generally load links in background tabs while reading through a page, but this could be extended to report on browsing and even suggest links.

The "are you sure you want to leave" alert makes me want to go away and stay away--it is not the helpful "close all open tabs?" from closing FireFox.

Have you considered using the right sidebar instead? Consider having a clean left-leading edge for readability.

Edit: Not to put too fine a point on, but the preload urls show up as visited anchor links (which I may not have read) when I go back to HN. Sometimes bug fixes can suggest a radically new way forward.

Show HN: prldr.com, preloading the internet, my weekend project.

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