[HN Gopher] Show HN: Thumbnail.ai - Just paste a blog post link ...
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Show HN: Thumbnail.ai - Just paste a blog post link and get a
thumbnail
Author : justhw
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-01-11 18:05 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thumbnail.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (thumbnail.ai)
| ve55 wrote:
| Love the demo links under the search bar: "Try these: TechRadar,
| AVC, Paul Graham, BBC, Medium, Pulse".
|
| I think one mistake a lot of people make on their landing page is
| to just give the user an empty search box and force them to come
| up with what to type as a test, rather than showing them a test
| yourself, which I imagine would significantly increase
| conversion.
| justhw wrote:
| Oh definitely! Removing every little friction is key. Thanks
| jtmarmon wrote:
| Those links are super useful - might I recommend making them
| a bit more obvious? I didn't notice them until I came back to
| HN and read the comments
| mritchie712 wrote:
| agreed, just make the text #fff
| edshiro wrote:
| Nice work! I like the quick rendering too.
|
| However, I don't believe any AI was used for this, so the actual
| TLD is a bit inappropriate here. A ".io" TLD would would have
| been more fitting.
|
| Not every slice of bread needs to be spread with butter.
| Similarly, not every project requires AI.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Maybe it's based in Anguilla :-)
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| This is great! It's such a frustrating process to jump out of a
| text editor to create an image and put it back in a post. I'll
| try this out for my next article or post!
| input_sh wrote:
| I just search for something vaguely similar on Unsplash and
| call it a day.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| This is similar to Bannerbear's offering but better! Good job!
| city41 wrote:
| It's an interesting idea. It did not make good thumbnails for my
| blog posts. I would not have used any of what it generated.
|
| If it did generate images I liked, I would be interested in using
| it, but I'd prefer to use it as part of a build step rather than
| adhoc per blog post.
| justhw wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the link you tried with? It could help
| me out. Thanks.
| city41 wrote:
| Sure, I tried https://mattgreer.dev/articles/mate-and-i3 I
| thought maybe it didn't work so well because the main image
| on that page is an svg? But this page has a png and had the
| same results, https://mattgreer.dev/articles/sega-saturn-and-
| transparency/
|
| here are the results I got: https://i.imgur.com/yzmbc22.png
|
| Also realizing the main png on that page is only 444x444, so
| maybe that's the issue. I do have larger images for twitter
| in meta tags, but I get using those defeats the purpose :)
| justhw wrote:
| Thanks matt, I found the problem, fixing it now. Here's how
| it should look. https://ibb.co/Kqr2zfZ
| city41 wrote:
| Nice, that looks good! Not the best source image, but
| that's my fault.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I got a 500 error on any pages within https://murex.rocks but
| every other site I tried worked fine. Really cool project this
| and polished rather nicely.
| albertgoeswoof wrote:
| Nice domain- any backstory to it?
| justhw wrote:
| thumbnail.ninja was not available this was available for
| regular price.
| tylermenezes wrote:
| Is there really any "AI"? It seems to just take the title and
| apply it to 4 templates.
| nirushiv wrote:
| ai is the Internet country code top-level domain for Anguilla.
| I wouldn't take the endings at face value.
| minimaxir wrote:
| I hacked and open-sourced a similar Python project last year to
| programmatically generate images based on templates by using a
| headless Google Chrome, allowing for the full gamut of CSS
| tricks: https://github.com/minimaxir/imgmaker
|
| It's currently being used in production where I work to generate
| some social media thumbnails which would otherwise be difficult
| to do using conventional Python image libraries.
| justhw wrote:
| This is using puppeteer as well. I checked yours out, it's
| pretty cool.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Using headless Firefox with a cloned profile allows you to
| easily screenshot services you're logged into. I will post
| the steps someday when I have my space on the net.
| [deleted]
| jtmarmon wrote:
| Where do the images come from on posts that don't have image
| content (eg http://paulgraham.com/genius.html has a ticket
| image)? What's the copyright situation there?
| justhw wrote:
| They're from free sites (pixabay currently...will add more).
|
| https://pixabay.com/service/terms/#license
|
| Images and videos are released under the Pixabay License and
| may be used freely for almost any purpose - even commercially.
| Attribution is appreciated, but not required.
| soneca wrote:
| I would like to use this for a service of mine once it has an
| API (added my email in the list).
|
| But if I send a link that has no relevant images on its page,
| I would prefer to receive no image (or maybe the favicon
| image) than a unrelated, keyword-matched stock image.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| This is great! Seems like something that would best be suited for
| a build process though, any thoughts on that?
| justhw wrote:
| Hi HN, I built this MVP because using an image editor to create
| thumbnails for my blog posts was time consuming.
|
| Good thumbnails can bring a lot of traffic to a post specially
| when shared on social networks. There are just 4 templates now
| and will add more. Please try your blog posts and I would love to
| hear your feedback.
| egorfine wrote:
| hey, a bugreport for you: not all sites have favicon.
|
| I specifically chose to not have one on my site, so URLs like
| 'https://egorfine.com/en/articles/painless-meetings/' will
| render a "broken image" icon on the top right.
| justhw wrote:
| Thanks egor.
|
| Are you also purposely not using title tags and description
| tags as well? I ran a couple pages from your site and they're
| all the same. May not be good for SEO as well.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Why is it better than opengraph ? (excluding platforms that
| don't use opengraph tag)
| justhw wrote:
| This is for opengraph. It gives you a nice image you can link
| to in the open graph meta tags.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Ah, got it.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| In fact, the end result is something very similar to
| Twitter Cards.
| onli wrote:
| This could be great in combination with a blog plugin.
|
| I'm not sure how useful it is for entries that already have a
| nice image, don't those posts already look great in most social
| networks? And if you are interested in traffic generation like
| that your entries probably have at least one image placed
| somewhere and the necessary HTML tags to use them set up.
|
| When the article has no image it seems more useful, with the
| image insertion feature you have there :)
|
| I took a moment to understand that the form changes the
| background of the generated image, because the first entry of
| mine I tried already had an image, so I did not get what
| `background` was referencing.
|
| To just offer to download the image then might be not enough.
| Many authors won't know how to embed them as an image used by
| social networks. Not sure how to solve that without going the
| plugin route, a smaller step could be presenting the needed
| html, or showing a guide how to use the generated image with
| some popular blog engines?
| justhw wrote:
| Great points. It definitely could use clearer steps and
| instructions. Thanks much for your feedback.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| ...fake/inaccessible twitter cards?
| callmeed wrote:
| This is pretty cool. I recently built a "StumbleUpon for
| eCommerce stores" (https://www.shiny.sale/) and did quite a bit
| of research trying to find a good screenshot API. I eventually
| settled on ApiFlash.
|
| I would definitely use this once I got into editorial content. I
| have a few suggestions for your homepage though:
|
| 1. The 3 steps you outline are still too vague, especially step 3
| ("upload it to your blog post"). Makes it sound like this will be
| one of my main images. I'd suggest some more detailed
| instructions for different blog platforms.
|
| 2. Is there no API or other way to auto-generate an image? If
| not, I'd suggest that be your next feature.
|
| 3. One of the examples (BBC) I generated resulted in a 3.3MB PNG
| file. You maybe want to provide some better
| compression/minification options for people. You definitely
| shouldn't be creating high-res PNGs when images are involved.
|
| 4. It was also 2400x1260 which doesn't qualify as a "Thumbnail"
| IMO. You may want to generate files closer to the preferred
| social specs. Twitter, for example, wants files < 5MB and don't
| need to be anywhere near that big[1].
|
| Anyway, hope that is helpful feedback. Great idea and MVP. Keep
| it up!
|
| [1] https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-
| websites/c...
| justhw wrote:
| Excellent points. Thanks much.
| cjr wrote:
| > did quite a bit of research trying to find a good screenshot
| API.
|
| Would be interested in this research if you're willing to
| share: Chris at urlbox.io
| joemasilotti wrote:
| Hey justhw, I launched something similar [1] a few months back.
| I'd love to talk with you about your stack. Here are the three
| biggest problems I ran into.
|
| 1. Request timeouts
|
| Even "fast" blogs sometimes have hiccups or rate-limit
| scrapers/crawlers. The more I scale the more often I see requests
| timing out. I've tried to mitigate this with retry buttons and
| trying the request again, but it doesn't always work.
|
| 2. Scaling Puppeteer
|
| I saw from another of your comments that this is built on top of
| Puppeteer. From my experience, trying to scale to even 3
| concurrent renders starts to fall apart when you have to spin up
| a new Chrome instance for each request.
|
| I've looked into Browserless [2] but they charge per second of
| usage, and I'm not at the point where I want to have that big of
| an expense.
|
| 3. Getting a relevant image
|
| I love that your tool adds an image to the thumbnail as well! I
| struggled with searching Unsplash using the text in the title of
| the article but they never came out that well.
|
| I love it when people make these massively useful services
| stitching together a few simple tools. Congrats on the launch!
|
| [1] https://mugshotbot.com [2] https://www.browserless.io
| gsundeep wrote:
| This looks awesome, any thoughts on making this automated?
|
| Here's a similar product I ran into here a while ago that uses
| the info in the other meta tags (title, description) to automate
| the creation of these images: https://www.mugshotbot.com/
|
| I also built something similar called Thumblink, which takes a
| screenshot of the page to create these images:
| https://thumblink.com
| justhw wrote:
| There were a lot of features that I did not build because it
| would take more than a week. I think automation will be
| important once I get a steady amount of users.
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(page generated 2021-01-11 22:01 UTC)