[HN Gopher] Show HN: Metacheck - preview how any link appears on...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Metacheck - preview how any link appears on social media
and chat apps
Hey HN, I've been an indie hacker for a while, but I haven't had
much success with my past projects. Recently, I came across Marc
Lou's advice about building free tools just for fun, so I decided
to give it a shot. I built Metacheck, a simple tool that lets you
preview how any link will appear on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Whatsapp,
Telegram, and other platforms. No API keys, no setup--just paste a
link and see the preview. Why I built this I often ran into issues
where social platforms displayed broken or unexpected link
previews. Debugging Open Graph meta tags was annoying, so I made a
tool to make it easier. How it works Fetches metadata from any URL
Parses Open Graph & Twitter Card tags Shows real-time previews of
how the link will look when shared Try it out:
https://metacheck.appstate.co/
Author : talljohnson1234
Score : 119 points
Date : 2025-03-11 20:53 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (metacheck.appstate.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (metacheck.appstate.co)
| vawogbemi wrote:
| can i see the code?
| talljohnson1234 wrote:
| Sure, will make it open source soon.
| pogue wrote:
| This is very cool!
|
| Would it be possible to add Bluesky link cards? It passes through
| this domain to extract the link card and can be very hit and miss
| on how they show up.
|
| https://cardyb.bsky.app/v1/extract?url=
|
| https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Abluesky-social%2Fatproto%...
| giantrobot wrote:
| Blue sky's card domain is cute and clever. I miss clever
| "machine" (may be a HA cluster) names.
| gigatree wrote:
| Probably want to have https appended automatically
| talljohnson1234 wrote:
| Would push a fix for this, apologies for the inconvenience.
| colesantiago wrote:
| Is this open source?
|
| I'm assuming it is since I see a GitHub logo on it, although it
| isn't working...
| talljohnson1234 wrote:
| Sorry, it was just an oversight. I will append the URL in the
| next deployment.
| pizzly wrote:
| This is very good. One thing though Telegram (at least the linux
| version) does not support transparency and makes the transparency
| red. However, Metacheck shows it as transparent. Having all this
| on one page is a massive time saver.
| imcritic wrote:
| An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific
| message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking
| sensitive details. A digest property is included on this error
| instance which may provide additional details about the nature of
| the error.
| talljohnson1234 wrote:
| Will look into this issue and push a fix.
| gazook89 wrote:
| I like it, and one additional thing (because isn't there always):
| It'd be nice if this could be offline to use with local
| development.
| swagatkonchada wrote:
| it doesn't recognise a url without the scheme? come on!
| talljohnson1234 wrote:
| Will push a fix for this, sorry about that.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| An error occurred in the Server Components render. The specific
| message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking
| sensitive details. A digest property is included on this error
| instance which may provide additional details about the nature of
| the error.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Here's a version of the same idea but runs locally, so you can
| test without deploying. https://apps.gnome.org/SharePreview/
|
| OP, maybe next step is to try a local version?
| brianfryer wrote:
| 10/10; thank you so much!
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Ah I'd been using https://www.opengraph.xyz/
| toteroni wrote:
| This is awesome! I can't believe this never occurred to me- my
| wife texts me links to her UX all the time to see how her changes
| look before the changes go to prod.
| bryanhogan wrote:
| Can anyone tell me why WhatsApp seems so random whether it
| display the social preview image and text or not? E.g. for my own
| website https://bryanhogan.com/ it shows up in the tool but not
| in actual chats.
| mh- wrote:
| I've noticed this just as a casual user of WhatsApp, when
| pasting links into a conversation. I'm not sure what triggers
| it either, but I can say that it sometimes works for (e.g.) one
| tweet and not another.
| esafak wrote:
| Maybe it times out depending on the load.
| ulrischa wrote:
| A good idea bit the visualisation ist wrong. I.e. the preview
| image will not be shown correctly
| 2big2fail_47 wrote:
| yeah it doesn't work if you try it with https://youtube.com
|
| i really like the idea though
| talljohnson1234 wrote:
| Would investigate why it wasn't working and push out a fix.
| thanks for trying it out.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| You might get more users if you had shareable URLs, e.g.
|
| https://metacheck.appstate.co/site/news.ycombinator.com
| flas9sd wrote:
| well done.. made me enable my static-sitegens opengraph plugin,
| add images, rewrite summaries, thanks!
|
| Mastodon preview? :)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-15 23:00 UTC)