Show IH: microlink.io, beautiful links previews for any website
Hello, everyone
My name's Kiko and I'm building microlink.io, a service for creating beautiful link previews.
It's similar to what Medium/Facebook/Twitter do, but out of the box, bringing your users to see what is behind any link, improving your user interaction for your website.
Here's an example using it on my blog: https://kikobeats.com/naming-things
We started the project because we felt that many online sites (news, blogs, etc) do not pay attention to how they are presenting the content. Although they may have good content, this is not attractive to read.
Microlink lets you create fancy links previews and easy to integrate.
It is structured into an API and SDK.
The Microlink API returns well structured normalized metadata from any link.
For example, this is the metadata extracted from indiehackers.com:
https://api.microlink.io/?url=https://www.indiehackers.com
The API returns normalized data, such as author, logo, image, video, description, etc... Additionally, it can provide you complementary information such as predominant colors per each image or even take a screenshot of the target url.
Check out the API possibilities at https://docs.microlink.io/api
On the other hand, we have Microlink SDK.
It consumes the data provided by the API, creating beautiful link previews for the end user.
Also, it allows you define the card design (orientation, kind of media, video behaviour, etc)
You can see demos and examples at https://docs.microlink.io/sdk.
About the product, I am very proud to say that the majority of microlink.io's code is Open Source!
Check out our organization on GitHub: https://github.com/microlinkhq. This makes the code less buggy and cheaper 🙂
Our pricing starts from $0/month and scales based on daily requests:
Any feedback is welcome. What do you think?
I like it!
One thing that rustled me a bit, though: there's no units on the numbers in the pricing section. It should read 500 reqs a day, 9 $/month.
I got that the limit is reset daily from reading the tooltip on the left, but it was slightly annoying and I still had to guess about the price.
This was a temporal bug, now should be looks fine, sorry for that 🙂
Hey Kiko! Congrats on shipping your product!
Microlink looks great! Quick question, do you get stats on the number of clicks?
Totally necessary and it's on the roadmap.
We want to add a dashboard per user to see impressions, also being possible support A/B testing for previews, supporting more than one url per preview and see what is working better 🙂
A/B testing sounds like a killer feature!
Thanks! All the best! :)
Thanks for all the feedback. Seriously, it's very appreciated how people help you to focus on the first impression.
Now we know that we need to put more attention in the way we are telling what we are doing.
We have been decided to redo the website. I hope to open a new showcase when it will be finished 🙂
The best thing about this site: I like trying something out. It shows me what you do and gives me confidence that you can do it.
The worst thing about this site: After I know what you can do, I don't feel compelled to use this, probably because I don't understand for what use cases it's a game changer --- and whether I have those use cases. Educate me with visuals and descriptions of game changing use cases. Then put this immediately after I try converting a link, so that "confidence that it does something" -> "confidence that I need it".
BTW: When I convert https://www.indiehackers.com/ the title is "Stripe" which seems wrong.
Thanks for your feedback. I feel it's very aligned with the rest of the feedback on the showcase: We need to improve how we communicate what we do.
This will be priority for us right now 🙂
About what title looks "Stripe" for indiehackers.com, yep, it's wrong, but in the site metadata.
This is an interesting part because you can use microlink as linter of metadata for checking all is okay.
Oh man! I will definitely give it a try! Nice service.
Thanks, appreciated!
Feel free to into our chat and ask anything
https://chat.microlink.io 🙂
Nice job! You shouldn’t require the URL scheme in the text field though. Assume HTTPS by default.
Could be a possibility, but we feel better be explicit, then there is no doubt 🙂
First of all congrats on shipping this. Awesome work Kiko 👏
The landing page is really beautiful. I really like the small details that you have taken care for eg. the background color changes depending on the website you click in the examples.
That said, I have some feedback on landing page.
This headline doesn't transmit the usefulness of your product. IMO could be changed to "Make your links more engaging" or something on those lines.
The JSON data containing all the meta information seemed a little overwhelming at first. I thought the section below (one between "Build rich media embeds" and "Take Screenshots" ) explained your value proposition better.
---
I also had a couple of follow up questions
Does this work on emails ? Might help in making my email newsletter more engaging 😊
Did you build this on your own ? How much time did you spend on building this ?
About follow up questions!
Email integration could be awesome. We don't experiment with this yet, but probably yes if you can append the SDK script. I'm going to contact you to do it.
It would be unfair to say that I have done everything. The project was started by me, but I'm under shoulders of giants, using OSS and creating a community around that.
Nowadays the impressive work on the frontend stuff was possible because @breadadams help me a LOT in the development process.
Thanks a lot, very appreciated 👏
The background color of the card is powered by the API. It detects predominant colors per each image from the target URL. The idea was creating a way to showcase this functionality as part of the website. Like a live demo of the product 🙂
We started building microlink just as an API. This explains why the copy of the way looks very data stuff.
The point here is, although links previews are the most evident way to use the data, actually you can use the data provided by the API for whatever you want.
I think you are right, if we focus the copy of the web just on what microlink does as link previews solution, and explaining later that previews are powered by the API (that it can take screenshot and do more extra stuff) will be easier understand the mission of the product.
Awesome job! This looks really cool :)
Great product! which stack did you use??
Hey,
Our stack is based on JavaScript.
From the backend side, we are using AWS Lambda as a solution to have and highly scalable microservice API.
At frontend, we are using mainly React to create a multi-purpose bundle to be consumed as vanilla code (WordPres, Jekyll, etc).
We release a lot of open source under our organization on GitHub!
https://github.com/microlinkhq