Show HN: Ctxt.io – share context of whatever you see with others in seconds

Built this when I was looking for a rich-text pastebin and couldn&#x27;t really find any around. This works instantly in seconds without any account and prioritizes just giving you a link to share.<p>Ended up being really useful whenever I wanted others to see what I had experienced on personalized websites (e.g. ranked feeds that would look different on different accounts, or change if reloaded e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAiPRWFg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAiPRWFg</a>), interview feedback, or even paywalled content if I just wanted to share a little snippet for fair-use and keep the HTML styles, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAACI6FQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAACI6FQ</a>. Scroll to the bottom of the page for these examples.<p>The main technical difficulty here was in trying to get all the CSS styles to be as accurate as possible, and the browser extension solves many of these, including proxying requests whenever necessary to bypass some restrictions. The browser extension doesn&#x27;t request any permissions, and won&#x27;t inject any content scripts on your page, so as someone who cares about security, is what I wouldn&#x27;t mind installing personally.<p>One cool thing I&#x27;ve discovered after building it is that it&#x27;s super useful for web developers to modify the DOM of pages and redo mockups and then use Context to re-share them with others for them to also modify: e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAA0KGcFA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAA0KGcFA</a><p>Everything is free for now (don&#x27;t worry about the $ signs), mainly interested in feedback. Thanks in advance!

Your TLS configuration is broken, in a way that often happens:<p>You aren&#x27;t serving the appropriate intermediates. It&#x27;s only serving the leaf certificate, but should also serve intermediates that get us to a trusted root.<p>Because browsers cache intermediates, this obscures the problem much of the time.<p>This is pretty amazing though. I copied some Go code from Gogland and got it in a browser, syntax highlighting and all! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAwO9VEA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAwO9VEA</a>

Wow, this is amazing. Seems like magic once I wonderstood what it does.<p>Like others here, at first I thought it was just another pastebin. I didn&#x27;t realize what it could do until I read your comment here in this thread. Seems dumb, but I didn&#x27;t notice I could scroll down for examples, and I also would have had no idea about the browser extension. I would have dismissed this almost immediately had I just visited the page. Perhaps you can make this things more obvious?<p>Also, any plans for a Firefox extension?<p><i></i>Note<i></i>: &quot;Wonderstood&quot; was a typo, but I&#x27;m leaving it because I like it :)

Couldn&#x27;t help myself... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;7j5RH" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;7j5RH</a><p>Kidding aside, this is a cool idea

I still don&#x27;t get it. Every page I try to contextify (wat) is looking like pasted in a 1999 WYSIWYG editor. How do you all get the correct styling etc with you? I&#x27;m using Firefox with uBlock and Disconnect.<p>Example page: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.golem.de&#x2F;ticker&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.golem.de&#x2F;ticker&#x2F;</a> - I tried to copy some listed links but they just look like standard Times New Roman after contextification: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAAPxhEA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ctxt.io&#x2F;2&#x2F;AAAAAPxhEA</a><p>Anyway, nice idea. I have ever used screenshots so far.

Pro-tip: be careful when you copying websites you are logged into as you could leak CSRF&#x2F;authentication tokens.

Took a little while to work out how cool this is, initially just thought it was just-another-pastebin.

I really like the clean UI first layout, but it could use an arrow&#x2F;indicator to emphasize the content below the fold; especially for first time visitors. I wish more sites prioritized their layout like you did. The core functionality seems solid, Nice work!

So I tried copying the site with fixed header and it broke the layout of your site - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;OADih" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;OADih</a><p>Otherwise, I like it for its simplicity.

I don&#x27;t think I quite get this. Everything I paste here shows up in plain text. It doesn&#x27;t automatically do any syntax highlighting; it only seems to work if you&#x27;re already copying rich text to begin with.

Is this the best site ever? Scrolled a bit and I completely got what it does

I&#x27;m not quite sure I understand how you&#x27;ve done it but it&#x27;s really nice (although I&#x27;m also concerned about cookie, csrf token issues as well).

Working well, thanks!<p>Do you have any plans to release the source code?

Interesting and simple concept, works great. Reminds me of a similar service I saw a few weeks ago, txt.fyi.

This is very well made, I&#x27;m going to add this to my bookmarks. Thank you &amp; good job!

Anyone else getting a certificate warning on mobile Chrome?

&gt; the hassle of secure clean-up within minutes.<p>The people that professionally create a hassle of security will beg to differ.<p>Edit: So just ignore them when they do that.

&gt; share context of whatever you see with others in seconds<p>ITYM &quot;within seconds, share with others the context of whatever you see&quot;. Yes?

Look idea, but I think it needs a better explanation, its a relatively complicated concept.

Woah! What sorcery is this?