9 ms·

Show HN: Embed HN comments in your website

137 points by franciscop 10y ago

lorddigital1 10y ago
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lorddigital1 10y ago
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lorddigital1 10y ago
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lorddigital1 10y ago
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franciscop 10y ago
Author here, it's still an early alpha but I'd love to answer any questions that you have. I also have some questions for you if you are interested in the project: - What are the features that you think are most exciting? - Where would you use it? What kind of projects? I have some ideas of use-cases, but I'd love to hear yours.
- capex 10y ago
  Seems like a great idea! Just yesterday I created hn-comments[1], a collection of great comments made on HN. Can I embed a single comment as well? Edited for clarity. [1] https://medium.com/hn-comments https://medium.com/hn-comments
  - franciscop 10y ago
    There is a `sort` and a `limit` parameters so you might be able to work with these if it happens that the comment is in a specified place, but that's really hacky. Otherwise, I could think about adding filters such as: <comment-box hackernews="11850599" filter="id:3243534" class="border"></comment-box> However arguably this is useful because you can show N comments and the UI is made around that. You could also just hide everything else through CSS though: https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/fygps59v/2/ https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/fygps59v/2/ comment-box .comment, comment-box .add { display: none; } comment-box #id-12898146 { display: block; }
    - capex 10y ago
      So every comment has its own id?
      - franciscop 10y ago
        In the back-end yes, and now in the front-end also (just pushed that update). They are identified in the list as: <li class="comment" id="id-6547567" class="ind-1">...</li> See updated answer and jsfiddle above
- jsingleton 10y ago
  Nice work! How does the initial submission to the sites work? Am I missing something or is this currently a manual process? It would be cool if it submitted on the first comment. N.B. If you auto add all your blog posts to HN you will get silently blocked from submitting (although it will still appear to work from your point of view). You will then need to, firstly notice this, then email the mods to get unblocked. I've hit this myself, so now I just include a simple link to: javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title) You can see this at the bottom of all my posts on https://unop.uk https://unop.uk and I've seen others do something similar.
speps 10y ago
Similar to this, except this one has Reddit comments as well : https://embedd.io/ https://embedd.io/
- Socketubs 10y ago
  And it works with url instead of story id by searching on HN or Reddit. Does it overwhelm browser by searching url like that? - comments.network seems to use internal api[1] - embedd.io directly request HN and Reddit 1: https://comments.network/api/ https://comments.network/api/
  - franciscop 10y ago
    I see they are using Algolia to do the requests (at least for HN) on the front-end. Unfortunately it is limited, as you cannot get from there whether the current thread is opened for comments or whether the comments are opened for reply. That's why I'm parsing Algolia AND HN's website for each of the comments, to mix the data. Also it makes it easier doing the work on the back-end to add new services and not depending on a 3rd party. See the changelog on the bottom of https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ to see those bugs fixed really recently.
    - Socketubs 10y ago
      I understand, but comments.network js snippet will stop working if you stop your server (comments.network/api), which is a 3rd-party service. Am I right?
      - franciscop 10y ago
        Right now (alpha) yes, but I'm exploring other options for its future. Do you have any idea? I want to avoid fragmentation initially so open-source right now is not viable as I cannot support many different pre-releases from different users, but I've definitely considering open-sourcing it in the future ( see http://github.com/franciscop/ http://github.com/franciscop/ ). For the sake of it I will point out that the alternative, is actually two different third-parties dependencies, http://embedd.io/ http://embedd.io/ snippet and https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ service (;
reitanqild 10y ago
Nice although I am sceptical. I kind of enjoyed the current userbase. Not sure I'd like anything that pushes HN far and wide.
- franciscop 10y ago
  More networks coming soon so you can actually show the comments where the appropriate audience is. I spent the last couple of days improving this so adding a new source is easy, and right now all the HN specific code stands on 130 lines (I am using 2 different sources for HN) and Reddit-specific code stands on 32 lines. I wouldn't expect someone adding comments to a recipes blog, so they could add the appropriate source for the comments. Someone suggested Designer News, so I'll make the integration after the Product Hunt one.
- brazzledazzle 10y ago
  I tend to agree and I say that with the full recognition of the hypocrisy of being a relatively new account. Cool idea though. I've thought about doing it with Reddit comments a few times over the years but I could only assume it's some kind of ToS violation.
- return0 10y ago
  Mom makes $2383 in a month working from home!! Check this out now!!!1 http://make-money-fast-like-instantly-no-srsly-now.cc.ee.bb/ http://make-money-fast-like-instantly-no-srsly-now.cc.ee.bb/
  - estefan 10y ago
    The server seems to be down...
- scott_s 10y ago
  I've read similar sentiments here for almost nine years - Hey, I like it here! And now that I'm here, I don't want it to change! But I don't think that's how healthy communities work.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
davej 10y ago
Awesome, you should also charge a nominal amount for the same service but without branding.
- franciscop 10y ago
  I thought about it but I remember reading https://www.groovehq.com/blog/increasing-traffic-to-our-site https://www.groovehq.com/blog/increasing-traffic-to-our-site (point 8) and other places that the benefits/disadvantages don' check out to remove it. I'm considering putting that on the bottom though. How much would you pay (for a lifetime) of removing it though? 10-50$?
  - davej 10y ago
    Something around $20/year sounds about right to me. I'd prefer a subscription model to be honest, seems more sustainable and I don't want the service to be gone in a year.
jsingleton 10y ago
Looks promising. There are plenty of issues with Disqus and running a full Discourse instance just for comments is probably overkill. This is my current low-tech solution on https://unop.uk https://unop.uk that works on any page (or any site for that matter): <a href="javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)">Submit / Comment on Hacker News</a>
- franciscop 10y ago
  That is totally awesome, I didn't know you could submit it like that, many actions in HN are protected with custom/per session tokens. I wonder if it'd be violating HN's ToS somehow... I contacted them for asking about some white-hat stuff, so I'll ask them again about adding something like that, but my guessing is if it's properly labeled as yours it'll be okay. Did you happen to contact them/find affirmative language anywhere? (you are not my lawyer and whatever you say is not legal advice, don' worry).
  - jsingleton 10y ago
    I think it's probably fine. It only pre-populates a form and doesn't automatically submit. It's also almost exactly the same as the official Bookmarklet that's linked to from the footer of most pages on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html
zubspace 10y ago
Oh, I've been waiting for something like this! This seems to work very well combined with static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo, because you don't need any kind of server-logic and database. The only other option I knew was Disqus, which in my opinion is a total train wreck on mobile (Messages not loading, clunky interface, awful branding).
- sleepychu 10y ago
  I think you need to know the HN post ID.
- franciscop 10y ago
  Yes, right now I'm in a bit of a stalemate with that since you'll need first to submit it to the networks and then to manually add the id. It's not a priority right now, but would you be interested on it submitting the page/post when you publish the page? Say add a button that says "Submit to Hacker News" and when clicked it gets automatically sent there (if technically/legally possible).
bambax 10y ago
This looks good. Minor gripe: not sure if it's a good idea that the network be an attribute name instead of an attribute value; to this: <comment-box hackernews="11850599" limit="1" class="border"></comment-box> I would prefer: <comment-box network="hackernews" items="11850599" limit="1" class="border"></comment-box> If you have a different attribute name per network, the DTD changes every time you add a network. Not that anyone cares, but still. - - - Edit: a previous version of this comment asked why the tag was not self-closing; in fact, custom elements in HTML5 should indeed have a closing tag; see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23961178/do-custom-elements-require-a-close-tag http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23961178/do-custom-elemen...
- jffry 10y ago
  I'm not sure that you can have self-closing custom tags in HTML5. Per [1], ...if the element is one of the void elements, or if the element is a foreign element, then there may be a single U+002F SOLIDUS character (/). This character has no effect on void elements, but on foreign elements it marks the start tag as self-closing. The list of element types [2] is fairly short, so I think if you attempted to self-close a custom tag, behavior might depend on how the parser's error recovery treats custom elements. [1] http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#start-tags http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#start-tags [2] http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#writing-html-documents-elements http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#writing-html-documents...
  - bambax 10y ago
    You're right it seems! I have edited my comment to reflect this. (Why would HTML5 have both self-closing and non-self closing tags though?? It's just a syntax shortcut, they should either take it or leave it, but create a special class of "empty tags" seems crazy to me).
- Navarr 10y ago
  I think keeping the network as an attribute name would allow it to do multiple networks in one box in the future.
phunehehe0 10y ago
One thing that struck me the other day was that HN disallows commenting on items older than 2 weeks. This pretty much rules out the use case for me. I have been on the receiving end of intriguing comments that arrived after 2 years. I would ask for Diaspora support, but after seeing that the comments will go through comments.network's infrastructure, I guess I'd rather not add that dependency. Nice idea though, if you are cool with limiting comments to 2 weeks. I know some people do like that.
- franciscop 10y ago
  One of the main points developing this was making it flexible on the back-end so adding new networks is a breeze. I am considering options for https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ future, since I would love for it to grow. Would you pay say 10-15$ for making it all open-source so you can install it on your own server?
  - phunehehe0 10y ago
    Not in my case. I accept to sacrifice some features to keep my blog static. Maybe something on the client side that pulls comments from a public source will do. Maybe even just "email me if you have a comment and I'll include it here".
    - franciscop 10y ago
      Wait so you'd rather not add https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ dependency but also not host it yourself; how would you set it up then? Also, would it be nice if Comments network integrated comments on their own when the thread is closed? So you can just comment on the site itself (once the network comments are closed it'd basically be an alternative to Disqus).
      - phunehehe0 10y ago
        If I cared enough I would have used something with built-in comment support, or something like stevekemp posted in a sibling of the parent (aunt/uncle?). I'm not sure I want to do that, because it seems overly complicated for little value. Just having a way for somebody reach out if they really want to is enough for me.
kinofcain 10y ago
Can we not do this, please? One of the reasons that HN comment threads are still mostly worthwhile when other sites and comment services are swamp fires is the community that has been built here. That people have to come here to read and reply helps us form that community and our social norms. Sometimes it's ok to remain a small club.
- sdegutis 10y ago
  No, communities grow and evolve, it's inevitable. Trying to prevent that in order to avoid the problems it comes with is understandable, but ends up causing other problems in their stead.
  - kinofcain 10y ago
    It's how it grows, and whether growth is the priority. Taking the HN comment community out of the context of the site makes it no different than any other drive-by commenting platform. This thought process: "HN Comments are great. I want comments on my site. Other comment systems are terrible. I'll put HN comments on my site". Misses the point of why HN comments are great and why these comments-as-a-platform services have all resulted in the same level of awful, despite repeated and varying attempts to solve the problem. Put a link to HN comments in your footer, bring them here, let the community and the mods help shape the discussion. Don't take the HN conversation out of context and splat it across the web. If you want federated comments, use one of the existing, awful, toxic commenting systems that inevitably result from that sort of usage.
    - franciscop 10y ago
      This has been asked/answered before, but basically it's all about context/relevance. I am adding more networks so you can keep things relevant. Made a blog post about your Raspberry Pi/Node.js server/Elixir? Cool, then HN might be a good fit and you can add the tag `hackernews="31415926535"`. Is it a cooking recipe? Then add that https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/ 's link to your post. Actually Reddit is great for this since they have many different topics, but I focused first on improving HN's version since that's the site I use most (it's still an alpha/dev version but wanted some feedback from HN). Definitely harming the HN community is something that has been mentioned several times which I didn't consider because of what I mentioned above, so I will take that into account when I publish the final version. I don't want to change/harm the community at all, just so other people can read the awesome comments that happen here.
tomaskafka 10y ago
Shameless plug: Chrome extension that shows HN comments for a visited page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sidebar%20%20/lhaapeacjhibkidjlohijakoflalfhdf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sideba... (it sends all visited urls to hn.algolia.com though, to find the discussion - beware)
- franciscop 10y ago
  Meta-meta; almost every time that I get something to the front page some shameless plugs appear; real question, how do you do it? Do you just browse HN and happen to see it or have a notification somehow set up? I would be really interested on seeing/getting notifications related to my projects (not just for shameless plugs, I've given tips that I think are useful for someone starting something similar as I did).
  - dlss 10y ago
    reading GP's comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomaskafka https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomaskafka) I'm not seeing any comments other than this one with the text "shameless plug" (though I didn't look back very far). Also, to answer your question, a quick googling turned up https://www.hnwatcher.com https://www.hnwatcher.com -- dunno if it's any good though.
    - franciscop 10y ago
      Oh I didn't mean by him, I mean by a different person (probably) each time.
      - dlss 10y ago
        Ahh, okay. That sounds like evidence for the "randomly happen to see" hypothesis then.
  - owenversteeg 10y ago
    Personally, I've shamelessly plugged a few FOSS projects of mine on HN (to varying degrees of success.) It happens very rarely, over the course of years, and when I randomly stumble across something interesting. Although I only read stuff on HN once or twice a day typically, I "check" HN several times a day, scanning the frontpage in seconds to see if there's anything that interests me. If it's something relevant to a project I'm working on, and people seem interested, I might plug my project. I've thought of setting up an alert for "opportunities to post a shameless plug" but decided against it (mostly because it seems against the spirit of HN.)
Jugurtha 10y ago
I think when we use the word "embed", we should really "embed". In other words, for a given comment of id ID, it'd be better to get the table row of class 'athing' and id ID. An important reason to embed is for visual authenticity. A Tweet is embedded with the styling that goes with it because it's recognizable. Similarly, I can see an HN comment with the styling and instantly know it's from HN. Besides visual authenticity, another reason to embed is for functionality. You can interact with an embedded tweet. For an HN comment, this assumes the reader to have an HN account, which is not as likely as a user having a twitter account, but considering the audience this might be wrong. This is not the problem, though.. The problem is that an HN comment is not a Tweet. It is not a sound-bite and voting on a comment that was taken out of context (which can be a long thread) is simply stupid, or something only a stupid person would do. The optimist would say: "someone with a Hacker News account isn't stupid enough to do that; they won't use the embedded comment for that". This makes embedding for functionality useless. The pessimist would say: only stupid people would do that and there are really stupid people who actually would do that, so why include a functionality that only stupid people would use? This also makes embedding for functionality useless. So I guess we're left with embedding for visual authenticity only. Or taking a screen shot of the element.
- franciscop 10y ago
  By embed I meant to embed the content; I've heard from quite a few people that they love that they can personalize it with simple CSS. I am not sure if this is a problem from me not being native (I'm Spanish) or just a special case/extreme use of the word embed. In both cases, embedding the functionality is not a possible due to common, sane web attack concerns; if I could allow you to change it then I could change it myself which would mean big trouble. What twitter does is keeping the control+developing their own code, an API/library that HN doesn't have available. And of course I'm now going down the road of asking for people's username/password of the different networks. Also something has to be said about the advantages of thin clients/strong back-ends, which means standardizing the response from https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ of the different networks.
  - Jugurtha 10y ago
wkoszek 10y ago
This looks really nice. Thanks for not forcing us to stick to yellow/orange colors etc.
sideproject 10y ago
shameless plug 2 (I saw another shameless plug)... I created hackernews.club https://hackernews.club https://hackernews.club Which shows posts and comments of any HN user. You can also create a HN profile widget you can embed anywhere. Here's mine. https://hackernews.club/hacker/profile/sideproject https://hackernews.club/hacker/profile/sideproject Love these types of HN tools though!
- franciscop 10y ago
  I am sorry but: 1. Other people doing something wrong is no justification at all, even though it's a human bias. 2. Other shameless plug was about a comment network for the front-end and back-end which includes HN, so it was not really shameless but an interesting and highly related project. This is just a random ad from something related to HN but has no kind of relationship with the original post... so please don't SPAM on HN.
bootload 10y ago
<script src="https://comments.network/comments.js"></script> https://comments.network/comments.js"></script> No need (for me). Recipe to roll your own comments for your DIY blog: - write your own templates, content and engine - crack out your python/alt-language and download the HN News API https://github.com/HackerNews/API https://github.com/HackerNews/API for favs/stories posted - find your firebase json repository https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/bootload.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/bootload.json?pri... - download json posts by id. For example ^this post^ cf: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/12904458.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/12904458.json?pri... - parse and roll into your blog. Wasn't that hard was it?
- franciscop 10y ago
  Not sure if serious or sarcastic. In case it's serious, you forgot: - Parse Hacker News from multiple sources because no one of them gives you all the information and correlate the info on each. - Add Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. Probably make it so that it's easy to implement on the back-end. Oh yeah you'll need a back-end because of the previous point. - Make some cache mechanism according to their robots.txt. - Optimize the assets. - Test it in different browsers + smartphones. Then that'd be rough outline of what I did (or plan on doing), so why repeat all the work when you just want a simple comment thread and not develop/maintain/host the solution yourself? PS, if you want to do it for learning, please go for it! You'll learn a lot for sure and if you contact me I can give you some tips.
jszymborski 10y ago
I really like the idea and also how it looks, but the main reason I balk at using something like Disqus is that I hate having to pull in javascript from domains and servers I don't control on personal sites. I think there is a large market for an open-source library that you can just drop in that functions exactly like this... particularly if you can manage to get it to run entirely client-side.

137 points by franciscop 10y ago

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lorddigital1 10y ago

franciscop 10y ago

Author here, it's still an early alpha but I'd love to answer any questions that you have. I also have some questions for you if you are interested in the project: - What are the features that you think are most exciting? - Where would you use it? What kind of projects? I have some ideas of use-cases, but I'd love to hear yours.

capex 10y ago
Seems like a great idea! Just yesterday I created hn-comments[1], a collection of great comments made on HN. Can I embed a single comment as well? Edited for clarity. [1] https://medium.com/hn-comments https://medium.com/hn-comments
- franciscop 10y ago
  There is a `sort` and a `limit` parameters so you might be able to work with these if it happens that the comment is in a specified place, but that's really hacky. Otherwise, I could think about adding filters such as: <comment-box hackernews="11850599" filter="id:3243534" class="border"></comment-box> However arguably this is useful because you can show N comments and the UI is made around that. You could also just hide everything else through CSS though: https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/fygps59v/2/ https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/fygps59v/2/ comment-box .comment, comment-box .add { display: none; } comment-box #id-12898146 { display: block; }
  - capex 10y ago
    So every comment has its own id?
    - franciscop 10y ago
      In the back-end yes, and now in the front-end also (just pushed that update). They are identified in the list as: <li class="comment" id="id-6547567" class="ind-1">...</li> See updated answer and jsfiddle above
jsingleton 10y ago
Nice work! How does the initial submission to the sites work? Am I missing something or is this currently a manual process? It would be cool if it submitted on the first comment. N.B. If you auto add all your blog posts to HN you will get silently blocked from submitting (although it will still appear to work from your point of view). You will then need to, firstly notice this, then email the mods to get unblocked. I've hit this myself, so now I just include a simple link to: javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title) You can see this at the bottom of all my posts on https://unop.uk https://unop.uk and I've seen others do something similar.

speps 10y ago

Similar to this, except this one has Reddit comments as well : https://embedd.io/ https://embedd.io/

Socketubs 10y ago
And it works with url instead of story id by searching on HN or Reddit. Does it overwhelm browser by searching url like that? - comments.network seems to use internal api[1] - embedd.io directly request HN and Reddit 1: https://comments.network/api/ https://comments.network/api/
- franciscop 10y ago
  I see they are using Algolia to do the requests (at least for HN) on the front-end. Unfortunately it is limited, as you cannot get from there whether the current thread is opened for comments or whether the comments are opened for reply. That's why I'm parsing Algolia AND HN's website for each of the comments, to mix the data. Also it makes it easier doing the work on the back-end to add new services and not depending on a 3rd party. See the changelog on the bottom of https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ to see those bugs fixed really recently.
  - Socketubs 10y ago
    I understand, but comments.network js snippet will stop working if you stop your server (comments.network/api), which is a 3rd-party service. Am I right?
    - franciscop 10y ago
      Right now (alpha) yes, but I'm exploring other options for its future. Do you have any idea? I want to avoid fragmentation initially so open-source right now is not viable as I cannot support many different pre-releases from different users, but I've definitely considering open-sourcing it in the future ( see http://github.com/franciscop/ http://github.com/franciscop/ ). For the sake of it I will point out that the alternative, is actually two different third-parties dependencies, http://embedd.io/ http://embedd.io/ snippet and https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/ service (;

reitanqild 10y ago

Nice although I am sceptical. I kind of enjoyed the current userbase. Not sure I'd like anything that pushes HN far and wide.

franciscop 10y ago
More networks coming soon so you can actually show the comments where the appropriate audience is. I spent the last couple of days improving this so adding a new source is easy, and right now all the HN specific code stands on 130 lines (I am using 2 different sources for HN) and Reddit-specific code stands on 32 lines. I wouldn't expect someone adding comments to a recipes blog, so they could add the appropriate source for the comments. Someone suggested Designer News, so I'll make the integration after the Product Hunt one.
brazzledazzle 10y ago
I tend to agree and I say that with the full recognition of the hypocrisy of being a relatively new account. Cool idea though. I've thought about doing it with Reddit comments a few times over the years but I could only assume it's some kind of ToS violation.
return0 10y ago
Mom makes $2383 in a month working from home!! Check this out now!!!1 http://make-money-fast-like-instantly-no-srsly-now.cc.ee.bb/ http://make-money-fast-like-instantly-no-srsly-now.cc.ee.bb/
- estefan 10y ago
  The server seems to be down...
scott_s 10y ago
I've read similar sentiments here for almost nine years - Hey, I like it here! And now that I'm here, I don't want it to change! But I don't think that's how healthy communities work.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

davej 10y ago

Awesome, you should also charge a nominal amount for the same service but without branding.

franciscop 10y ago
I thought about it but I remember reading https://www.groovehq.com/blog/increasing-traffic-to-our-site https://www.groovehq.com/blog/increasing-traffic-to-our-site (point 8) and other places that the benefits/disadvantages don' check out to remove it. I'm considering putting that on the bottom though. How much would you pay (for a lifetime) of removing it though? 10-50$?
- davej 10y ago
  Something around $20/year sounds about right to me. I'd prefer a subscription model to be honest, seems more sustainable and I don't want the service to be gone in a year.

jsingleton 10y ago

Looks promising. There are plenty of issues with Disqus and running a full Discourse instance just for comments is probably overkill. This is my current low-tech solution on https://unop.uk https://unop.uk that works on any page (or any site for that matter): <a href="javascript:window.location=%22https://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title)">Submit / Comment on Hacker News</a>

franciscop 10y ago
That is totally awesome, I didn't know you could submit it like that, many actions in HN are protected with custom/per session tokens. I wonder if it'd be violating HN's ToS somehow... I contacted them for asking about some white-hat stuff, so I'll ask them again about adding something like that, but my guessing is if it's properly labeled as yours it'll be okay. Did you happen to contact them/find affirmative language anywhere? (you are not my lawyer and whatever you say is not legal advice, don' worry).
- jsingleton 10y ago
  I think it's probably fine. It only pre-populates a form and doesn't automatically submit. It's also almost exactly the same as the official Bookmarklet that's linked to from the footer of most pages on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html https://news.ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html

zubspace 10y ago

Oh, I've been waiting for something like this! This seems to work very well combined with static site generators like Jekyll and Hugo, because you don't need any kind of server-logic and database. The only other option I knew was Disqus, which in my opinion is a total train wreck on mobile (Messages not loading, clunky interface, awful branding).

sleepychu 10y ago
I think you need to know the HN post ID.
franciscop 10y ago
Yes, right now I'm in a bit of a stalemate with that since you'll need first to submit it to the networks and then to manually add the id. It's not a priority right now, but would you be interested on it submitting the page/post when you publish the page? Say add a button that says "Submit to Hacker News" and when clicked it gets automatically sent there (if technically/legally possible).

bambax 10y ago

This looks good. Minor gripe: not sure if it's a good idea that the network be an attribute name instead of an attribute value; to this: <comment-box hackernews="11850599" limit="1" class="border"></comment-box> I would prefer: <comment-box network="hackernews" items="11850599" limit="1" class="border"></comment-box> If you have a different attribute name per network, the DTD changes every time you add a network. Not that anyone cares, but still. - - - Edit: a previous version of this comment asked why the tag was not self-closing; in fact, custom elements in HTML5 should indeed have a closing tag; see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23961178/do-custom-elements-require-a-close-tag http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23961178/do-custom-elemen...

jffry 10y ago
I'm not sure that you can have self-closing custom tags in HTML5. Per [1], ...if the element is one of the void elements, or if the element is a foreign element, then there may be a single U+002F SOLIDUS character (/). This character has no effect on void elements, but on foreign elements it marks the start tag as self-closing. The list of element types [2] is fairly short, so I think if you attempted to self-close a custom tag, behavior might depend on how the parser's error recovery treats custom elements. [1] http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#start-tags http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#start-tags [2] http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#writing-html-documents-elements http://w3c.github.io/html/syntax.html#writing-html-documents...
- bambax 10y ago
  You're right it seems! I have edited my comment to reflect this. (Why would HTML5 have both self-closing and non-self closing tags though?? It's just a syntax shortcut, they should either take it or leave it, but create a special class of "empty tags" seems crazy to me).
Navarr 10y ago
I think keeping the network as an attribute name would allow it to do multiple networks in one box in the future.

phunehehe0 10y ago

One thing that struck me the other day was that HN disallows commenting on items older than 2 weeks. This pretty much rules out the use case for me. I have been on the receiving end of intriguing comments that arrived after 2 years. I would ask for Diaspora support, but after seeing that the comments will go through comments.network's infrastructure, I guess I'd rather not add that dependency. Nice idea though, if you are cool with limiting comments to 2 weeks. I know some people do like that.

franciscop 10y ago
One of the main points developing this was making it flexible on the back-end so adding new networks is a breeze. I am considering options for https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ future, since I would love for it to grow. Would you pay say 10-15$ for making it all open-source so you can install it on your own server?
- phunehehe0 10y ago
  Not in my case. I accept to sacrifice some features to keep my blog static. Maybe something on the client side that pulls comments from a public source will do. Maybe even just "email me if you have a comment and I'll include it here".
  - franciscop 10y ago
    Wait so you'd rather not add https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ dependency but also not host it yourself; how would you set it up then? Also, would it be nice if Comments network integrated comments on their own when the thread is closed? So you can just comment on the site itself (once the network comments are closed it'd basically be an alternative to Disqus).
    - phunehehe0 10y ago
      If I cared enough I would have used something with built-in comment support, or something like stevekemp posted in a sibling of the parent (aunt/uncle?). I'm not sure I want to do that, because it seems overly complicated for little value. Just having a way for somebody reach out if they really want to is enough for me.

kinofcain 10y ago

Can we not do this, please? One of the reasons that HN comment threads are still mostly worthwhile when other sites and comment services are swamp fires is the community that has been built here. That people have to come here to read and reply helps us form that community and our social norms. Sometimes it's ok to remain a small club.

sdegutis 10y ago
No, communities grow and evolve, it's inevitable. Trying to prevent that in order to avoid the problems it comes with is understandable, but ends up causing other problems in their stead.
- kinofcain 10y ago
  It's how it grows, and whether growth is the priority. Taking the HN comment community out of the context of the site makes it no different than any other drive-by commenting platform. This thought process: "HN Comments are great. I want comments on my site. Other comment systems are terrible. I'll put HN comments on my site". Misses the point of why HN comments are great and why these comments-as-a-platform services have all resulted in the same level of awful, despite repeated and varying attempts to solve the problem. Put a link to HN comments in your footer, bring them here, let the community and the mods help shape the discussion. Don't take the HN conversation out of context and splat it across the web. If you want federated comments, use one of the existing, awful, toxic commenting systems that inevitably result from that sort of usage.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    This has been asked/answered before, but basically it's all about context/relevance. I am adding more networks so you can keep things relevant. Made a blog post about your Raspberry Pi/Node.js server/Elixir? Cool, then HN might be a good fit and you can add the tag `hackernews="31415926535"`. Is it a cooking recipe? Then add that https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/ 's link to your post. Actually Reddit is great for this since they have many different topics, but I focused first on improving HN's version since that's the site I use most (it's still an alpha/dev version but wanted some feedback from HN). Definitely harming the HN community is something that has been mentioned several times which I didn't consider because of what I mentioned above, so I will take that into account when I publish the final version. I don't want to change/harm the community at all, just so other people can read the awesome comments that happen here.

tomaskafka 10y ago

Shameless plug: Chrome extension that shows HN comments for a visited page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sidebar%20%20/lhaapeacjhibkidjlohijakoflalfhdf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-sideba... (it sends all visited urls to hn.algolia.com though, to find the discussion - beware)

franciscop 10y ago
Meta-meta; almost every time that I get something to the front page some shameless plugs appear; real question, how do you do it? Do you just browse HN and happen to see it or have a notification somehow set up? I would be really interested on seeing/getting notifications related to my projects (not just for shameless plugs, I've given tips that I think are useful for someone starting something similar as I did).
- dlss 10y ago
  reading GP's comment history (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomaskafka https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=tomaskafka) I'm not seeing any comments other than this one with the text "shameless plug" (though I didn't look back very far). Also, to answer your question, a quick googling turned up https://www.hnwatcher.com https://www.hnwatcher.com -- dunno if it's any good though.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    Oh I didn't mean by him, I mean by a different person (probably) each time.
    - dlss 10y ago
      Ahh, okay. That sounds like evidence for the "randomly happen to see" hypothesis then.
- owenversteeg 10y ago
  Personally, I've shamelessly plugged a few FOSS projects of mine on HN (to varying degrees of success.) It happens very rarely, over the course of years, and when I randomly stumble across something interesting. Although I only read stuff on HN once or twice a day typically, I "check" HN several times a day, scanning the frontpage in seconds to see if there's anything that interests me. If it's something relevant to a project I'm working on, and people seem interested, I might plug my project. I've thought of setting up an alert for "opportunities to post a shameless plug" but decided against it (mostly because it seems against the spirit of HN.)

Jugurtha 10y ago

I think when we use the word "embed", we should really "embed". In other words, for a given comment of id ID, it'd be better to get the table row of class 'athing' and id ID. An important reason to embed is for visual authenticity. A Tweet is embedded with the styling that goes with it because it's recognizable. Similarly, I can see an HN comment with the styling and instantly know it's from HN. Besides visual authenticity, another reason to embed is for functionality. You can interact with an embedded tweet. For an HN comment, this assumes the reader to have an HN account, which is not as likely as a user having a twitter account, but considering the audience this might be wrong. This is not the problem, though.. The problem is that an HN comment is not a Tweet. It is not a sound-bite and voting on a comment that was taken out of context (which can be a long thread) is simply stupid, or something only a stupid person would do. The optimist would say: "someone with a Hacker News account isn't stupid enough to do that; they won't use the embedded comment for that". This makes embedding for functionality useless. The pessimist would say: only stupid people would do that and there are really stupid people who actually would do that, so why include a functionality that only stupid people would use? This also makes embedding for functionality useless. So I guess we're left with embedding for visual authenticity only. Or taking a screen shot of the element.

franciscop 10y ago
By embed I meant to embed the content; I've heard from quite a few people that they love that they can personalize it with simple CSS. I am not sure if this is a problem from me not being native (I'm Spanish) or just a special case/extreme use of the word embed. In both cases, embedding the functionality is not a possible due to common, sane web attack concerns; if I could allow you to change it then I could change it myself which would mean big trouble. What twitter does is keeping the control+developing their own code, an API/library that HN doesn't have available. And of course I'm now going down the road of asking for people's username/password of the different networks. Also something has to be said about the advantages of thin clients/strong back-ends, which means standardizing the response from https://comments.network/ https://comments.network/ of the different networks.
- Jugurtha 10y ago

wkoszek 10y ago

This looks really nice. Thanks for not forcing us to stick to yellow/orange colors etc.

sideproject 10y ago

shameless plug 2 (I saw another shameless plug)... I created hackernews.club https://hackernews.club https://hackernews.club Which shows posts and comments of any HN user. You can also create a HN profile widget you can embed anywhere. Here's mine. https://hackernews.club/hacker/profile/sideproject https://hackernews.club/hacker/profile/sideproject Love these types of HN tools though!

franciscop 10y ago
I am sorry but: 1. Other people doing something wrong is no justification at all, even though it's a human bias. 2. Other shameless plug was about a comment network for the front-end and back-end which includes HN, so it was not really shameless but an interesting and highly related project. This is just a random ad from something related to HN but has no kind of relationship with the original post... so please don't SPAM on HN.

bootload 10y ago

franciscop 10y ago
Not sure if serious or sarcastic. In case it's serious, you forgot: - Parse Hacker News from multiple sources because no one of them gives you all the information and correlate the info on each. - Add Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. Probably make it so that it's easy to implement on the back-end. Oh yeah you'll need a back-end because of the previous point. - Make some cache mechanism according to their robots.txt. - Optimize the assets. - Test it in different browsers + smartphones. Then that'd be rough outline of what I did (or plan on doing), so why repeat all the work when you just want a simple comment thread and not develop/maintain/host the solution yourself? PS, if you want to do it for learning, please go for it! You'll learn a lot for sure and if you contact me I can give you some tips.

jszymborski 10y ago

I really like the idea and also how it looks, but the main reason I balk at using something like Disqus is that I hate having to pull in javascript from domains and servers I don't control on personal sites. I think there is a large market for an open-source library that you can just drop in that functions exactly like this... particularly if you can manage to get it to run entirely client-side.