lot3oo

The red part of Canada should be "Loyalists" - british decendents + various elite / slave owners that moved north after American independance.

Very much not the same as US "midlands" in my opinion.

Hey folks!

I've been cooking this up for the past few weeks. It's a small CLI to manage secrets that stores them in keychains on macOS.

I wrote this after rejecting OnePassword / Keeper / lastpass as I don't want to rely on a third party and a credit card subscription for what is really just... storing strings?

My needs were simple: a CLI to securely store secrets and inject them in scripts. That's mostly it. Everything else seemed overkill. Now with keychains, I get that, plus a nice UI to manage my secrets afterwards and syncing across my machines.

Hope this is useful for someone else!

Thank you, let me know what you think!

Everyone is out here making fancy AI projects and talking about high tech stuff. In the mean time, I wrote this plain bash script to convert .ics files (a format from 1998) to CSV files.

This lets you explore your calendar data without needing to setup API access and deal with authorization to your calendar software's API. (common ones all have .ics exports readily available)

Combine this with CSV tooling and you got yourself some quick and easy calendar data analysis / exploration setup.

Hope you like it!

CSV utilities (still haven't pick a favorite one...): https://github.com/harelba/q https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv https://github.com/wireservice/csvkit https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

I tend to disagree with some of the top comments here.

I was in a similar spot as well, "sucked it up" for way too long until I started interviewing for new jobs and realized that there were many, better suited jobs (better fit) for me out there. (Salary upgrades too)

There are many places that are more "flat structures", where it's encouraged to take decisions as a group. No one is an official "lead/architect/decision maker": we're all happy to bounce ideas around and ask to the ones with more experience in the revelant areas for advice.

When interviewing, you can ask questions around this specific issue as well to find the right places.

Where I work right now, most devs share the same feelings as you towards "architect" roles.

Software is a craft, not an exact science.

As a french canadian this page sounds pretty similar to what we refer to as "les filles du roi"

Hey folks I posted this a while back when I had just a small MVP and a had a little bit of feedback from here. It’s my first-ever “SAAS” app built on my own, after years of doing it for others in the agency world . It’s a small “API-like” tool that lets you easily auto-generate “Link preview” thumbnails (og:image) for your website's pages, based on HTML/CSS templates you provide. This way, when links to your site are shared on the internet, a nice standard picture with relevant information can be shown instead of a generic image or nothing at all.

I cleared some time to work on it in last november and have been building it on my own since. Last 2-3 weeks, holidays got basically cancelled because of the pandemic where I live (Montreal) so I had a lot of free time to work on it, so it’s starting to look pretty good now!

Some of you folks on HN seem pretty experienced, so I’m hoping to get some feedback/roast if you check it out! Do you think it’s a good idea? Does the pricing make sense to you? Would you / not use it? Why?

Thanks so much!

Hey folks I posted this a while back when I had just a small MVP and a had a little bit of feedback from here. It’s my first-ever “SAAS” app built on my own, after years of doing it for others in the agency world .

It’s a small “API-like” tool that lets you easily auto-generate “Link preview” thumbnails (og:image) for your website's pages, based on HTML/CSS templates you provide. This way, when links to your site are shared on the internet, a nice standard picture with relevant information can be shown instead of a generic image or nothing at all.

I cleared some time to work on it in last november and have been building it on my own since. Last 2-3 weeks, holidays got basically cancelled because of the pandemic where I live (Montreal) so I had a lot of free time to work on it, so it’s starting to look pretty good now!

Some of you folks on HN seem pretty experienced, so I’m hoping to get some feedback/roast if you check it out! Do you think it’s a good idea? Does the pricing make sense to you? Would you / not use it? Why?

Thanks so much!

No traction... Will try again tomorrow! :(

Hi HN,

I posted this a while back when I had just a small MVP and a had a little bit of feedback from here. A month of development later during Christmas, new years, and a lockdown, my first ever "API-like" service looks much more solid, and I would love to get some more honest feedback from the community here!

It's a tool that lets you easily add these dynamic "Link preview" thumbnails to your site's pages. This way, when links to your site are shared on the internet, a nice, on-brand, tailored picture can be shown instead of a generic image or nothing at all.

There is a really nice CLI based on vitejs you can try out to help with making the thumbnails.

How does it work ?

In short, you provide the service with some custom HTML/CSS templates, then a simple, public-facing "API" will be created for each template. This "API" will return rendered pictures of the templates dynamically based on the variables you prodive via query parameters - all in a scalable, production-ready way. You don't have to manage anything else.

Once you created and uploaded a template, you just need to "Hook up" the templates to your pages via meta tags in your site's <head>. You can use your framework / environment of choice to create the URL strings, passing variables to your templates via query string parameters.

Let me know what you think, thank you so much!

(This has not gained any interest - I will try again at another time. Hope that's okay!)

Hi HN,

I posted this a while back when I had just a small MVP and a had a little bit of feedback from here. A month of development later during Christmas, new years, and a lockdown, my first ever service that I'm not building for someone else is much more solid looking, and I would love to get some more honest feedback from the community here!

Thumbsmith is a tool for site owners and web developers that lets you easily add dynamic "Link preview" thumbnails to your site's pages. This way, when they are shared on the internet, a nice, on-brand, tailored picture can be shown instead of a generic photo.

It helps content-heavy startups increate their click through rates on their links, improve their site's sharing experience and gain insight on the visibility of their websites on the web.

There is a really nice CLI based on vitejs you can try out to help with making the thumbnails.

Let me know what you think, thank you so much!

Yeah the use-cases I'm going for are sites that have a lot of content (pages), which would take too much time to create a custom image for each page.

Ex: blog posts, products, buy/sell sites, etc.

If your page already has a custom image made in photoshop with text on it, it's not very useful (as you would want to use your custom image anyways).

This needs to be clearer on the home page, thanks for trying it!

Ah I see what you mean. This would be an easily supported use case actually (you can already do it by using the same URL and downloading the picture, but it's not documented). I need to add more documentation regarding this!

Thanks for sharing!

Hi Derek, thanks for trying it out! I think adding a download button would be a good idea indeed, but maybe it's not clear enough how to "use" your template. The point of having it hosted by this external service was that it can dynamically generate all your pictures, for all your content, based on your content's data.

In JavaScript, for example, on a theoretical blog site, you could configure it like this:

const article = await fetchArticle(router.query.id);

const queryString = new URLSearchParams(article).toString();

const url = `https://cdn.ogimg.io/v1/u/your-name/blog?${queryString}`;

// add this in the <head> where appropriate...

<meta property="og:image" content="${url}" />

This will add nice pictures for all your articles at once based on your template.

I think I need to make this more clear!

Hi HN,

After years of doing SAAS apps for others in the agency world, I'm finally working on own first ever SAAS app!

It lets you easily add these dynamic, templated "Link preview" images to your pages so that when they are shared, a nice picture with tailored information can be shown instead of a generic stock image or something irrelevant.

It's not a new idea: github.com and dev.to already do this (you can see custom pictures for every link), but it requires a lot of infrastructure work / puppeteer configuration that not every one can afford to do.

This service allows any site (Wordpress, shopify, laravel, react, vue etc...) to easily add them.

This is the first time I share it online. I'm at a point where I need to gather feedback from real users. At the moment it's completely free, but if it gains traction and higher traffic sites use it, I will have to add paid plans to make it sustainable. Free account will still work but with a capped amount of requests (that should be high enough for smaller sites to stay on a free plan)...

While I'm here, any better name ideas for the project? I stuck with ogimg.io, but turns out my friends see this as "Original Gangster images" instead of "Open Graph images"...

Anyways, first ever full-on SAAS product I roll out on my own so I'm pretty excited to see where it goes!