Hey HN, I created Smort as I wanted to highlight an article and share it with a friend but couldn't find an easy way of doing it.<p>Smort lets you easily edit, annotate and share an article. To read any article, just prepend smort.io/ before a URL in a browser. (I recently found out that even 12ft.io/ uses the same technique). Smort is free to use and shareable links are valid for 7 days from creation. Permanent links will be supported soon.<p>I'm primarily a backend/ML engineer so had to learn all things frontend to build Smort. I started out developing in SvelteKit and loved it but later migrated to React & Nextjs due to better third party library support. I have lots of ideas on how to take Smort forward and would love for you all to use it. Please join our Discord to share your curated articles and feedback!<p>This is a walkthrough article detailing everything Smort can do at the moment - <a href="https://smort.io/demo-walkthrough" rel="nofollow">https://smort.io/demo-walkthrough</a>.<p>Smort's name was inspired by the memes [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=smort+meme&tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=smort+meme&tbm=isch</a>
As a small suggestion, I would show any edits to the text of a smort’d article in another color and state that in the banner. It’s far to easy to completely rewrite an article, share it, and claim that it was from the source. I know, it’s kind of an edge case of a bad actor. And yes, I know you could do this through other methods, just would be a nice feature to not only deter said bad actor but also let me know what I edited.
Nice tool! I'm sure you're thinking of it, but are you planning on a Chrome extension for this? :)<p>Speaking of articles and annotations, I've also recently launched a project (a little different) which allows annotate and read research papers (PDFs) easily if anyone is interested.<p><a href="https://scholars.io" rel="nofollow">https://scholars.io</a>
It even works on itself: <a href="https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io</a><p>But another level of recursion seems to lose the content: <a href="https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io/https:/smort.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io/https:/smort.io</a>
This looks really well made, congratulations!<p>I have been working on a similar tool that lets you annotate anything online and have discussions. Conote is focused mainly on the discussion aspect and the annotation is more of a tool to aid discussion.<p><a href="https://conote.page" rel="nofollow">https://conote.page</a>
Are you in the Bay Area? Would like to discuss a potential talk at Reactathon (IRL, outdoors -- <a href="https://reactathon.com" rel="nofollow">https://reactathon.com</a>) if you're interested!
Cool, I was trying it out but couldn't annotate. I could highlight and remove highlights but not add anything else. For example, to add _ to bold. I type '_' and nothing happens. Am I missing something?