Love the demo links under the search bar: "Try these: TechRadar, AVC, Paul Graham, BBC, Medium, Pulse".<p>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.
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: <a href="https://github.com/minimaxir/imgmaker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/minimaxir/imgmaker</a><p>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.
I'm using Statically (<a href="https://statically.io/" rel="nofollow">https://statically.io/</a>) which offers screenshot API so thumbnail can be generated automatically. In my blog template, I use the following snippet:<p><pre><code> <meta property="og:image" content="https://cdn.statically.io/screenshot/<%- post.link %>"></code></pre>
Hi HN, I built this MVP because using an image editor to create thumbnails for my blog posts was time consuming.<p>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.
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.<p>1. Request timeouts<p>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.<p>2. Scaling Puppeteer<p>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.<p>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.<p>3. Getting a relevant image<p>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.<p>I love it when people make these massively useful services stitching together a few simple tools. Congrats on the launch!<p>[1] <a href="https://mugshotbot.com" rel="nofollow">https://mugshotbot.com</a>
[2] <a href="https://www.browserless.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.browserless.io</a>
I use Bannerbear[1] for this purpose. Works well and the founder is doing the whole "Open Startup"[2] thing, so that's cool too.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bannerbear.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bannerbear.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.bannerbear.com/open/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bannerbear.com/open/</a>
This is pretty cool. I recently built a "StumbleUpon for eCommerce stores" (<a href="https://www.shiny.sale/" rel="nofollow">https://www.shiny.sale/</a>) and did quite a bit of research trying to find a good screenshot API. I eventually settled on ApiFlash.<p>I would definitely use this once I got into editorial content. I have a few suggestions for your homepage though:<p>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.<p>2. Is there no API or other way to auto-generate an image? If not, I'd suggest that be your next feature.<p>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.<p>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].<p>Anyway, hope that is helpful feedback. Great idea and MVP. Keep it up!<p>[1] <a href="https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/cards/overview/summary-card-with-large-image" rel="nofollow">https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-for-websites/c...</a>
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!
Where do the images come from on posts that don't have image content (eg <a href="http://paulgraham.com/genius.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/genius.html</a> has a ticket image)? What's the copyright situation there?
This looks awesome, any thoughts on making this automated?<p>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: <a href="https://www.mugshotbot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mugshotbot.com/</a><p>I also built something similar called Thumblink, which takes a screenshot of the page to create these images: <a href="https://thumblink.com" rel="nofollow">https://thumblink.com</a>
It appears that your logo is 404ing so I get a "broken image" link in the corner of the images.<p><a href="https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWUrYw7zrcnWLEyFafnGgxuZWGuXQ8eDJNHc3Je5KPqbt" rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmWUrYw7zrcnWLEyFafnGgxuZWGuXQ8eDJNHc3J...</a>
I generate screenshots/thumbnails in two sizes during the build process of <a href="https://datacrayon.com/" rel="nofollow">https://datacrayon.com/</a>. They're used for twitter cards and to make the homepage a little more interesting!
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.<p>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.
Nice work! I like the quick rendering too.<p>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.<p>Not every slice of bread needs to be spread with butter. Similarly, not every project requires AI.
I got a 500 error on any pages within <a href="https://murex.rocks" rel="nofollow">https://murex.rocks</a> but every other site I tried worked fine. Really cool project this and polished rather nicely.