Show HN: Fetchful - Fetch page information previews from any link

http://www.fetchful.com

by tjlivesey • 15 years ago

8 14 15 years ago

thepumpkin19792• 15 years ago

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.

tjlivesey7• 15 years ago

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.

thepumpkin19792• 15 years ago

Nice job!

lightyrs2• 15 years ago

This is great. Thank you!

tjlivesey7• 15 years ago

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.

lightyrs2• 15 years ago

Can you add support for multiple URLs?

saiko-chriskun• 15 years ago

how does this compare to embed.ly?

tjlivesey7• 15 years ago

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.

garbowza• 15 years ago

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.

tjlivesey7• 15 years ago

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.

rudle• 15 years ago

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.

tjlivesey7• 15 years ago

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.

Show HN: Fetchful - Fetch page information previews from any link

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