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Show HN: Ctxt.io – share context of whatever you see with others in seconds
- kahseng 10y agoBuilt this when I was looking for a rich-text pastebin and couldn't really find any around. This works instantly in seconds without any account and prioritizes just giving you a link to share. 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. https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAiPRWFg https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAiPRWFg), interview feedback, or even paywalled content if I just wanted to share a little snippet for fair-use and keep the HTML styles, https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAACI6FQ https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAACI6FQ. Scroll to the bottom of the page for these examples. 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't request any permissions, and won't inject any content scripts on your page, so as someone who cares about security, is what I wouldn't mind installing personally. One cool thing I've discovered after building it is that it'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. https://ctxt.io/2/AAAA0KGcFA https://ctxt.io/2/AAAA0KGcFA Everything is free for now (don't worry about the $ signs), mainly interested in feedback. Thanks in advance!
- chatmasta 10y agoPretty cool. Similar to www.archive.is.
- samuelantonioli 10y agoI've built something similar https://richie.stormconcept.de https://richie.stormconcept.de [0], but the proxying is what amazes me: How do you proxy the requests? I think it's a great idea and incredibly useful. [0]: uploaded it to https://github.com/samuelantonioli/richie https://github.com/samuelantonioli/richie (added "expires", good idea) p.s.: I've solved the problem with fixed headers using a fixed header with a high z-index (unfortunately this hides the fixed header of the copied website). p.p.s.: Maybe it's possible to build it as a small community-maintained project, that would be great.
- kahseng 10y agoCool yup that's how it all first started, a single page and trying to use JS to capture content editable. Happy to think of ways to collaborate.
- audiodude 10y agohttps://ctxt.io/2/AAAAAHJkFA https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAAHJkFA
- jsloss 10y ago"I was looking for a rich-text pastebin and couldn't really find any around. This works instantly in seconds without any account and prioritizes just giving you a link to share." You should say this on your site. Found it rather confusing until I read your reply here.
- aryamaan 10y agoHow does this work? When I copy past above comment, it preserves the font, background, and other things. Does that mean clipboard always captures these data but other things discard them?
- glitchdout 10y agoOf course. That's why “Ctrl + Shift + V” exists — to paste plain, non-formatted text.
- willempienaar 10y agoWorking well, thanks! Do you have any plans to release the source code?
- kahseng 10y agoThanks! Is this because you would rather verify things are what I say they are (no content stored elsewhere) and use this service, or to run your own, or just learn? Right now, code quality isn't in a state to open-source, but I'm thinking about it.
- staz 10y agoThe first two for me ;)
- erid 10y agoI would like to learn how you did it, plus seeing the source code is usually very enjoyable for me, you learn a lot of things from it.
- willempienaar 10y agoA side project of mine requires similar functionality in terms of copying and pasting text. I would like to see how you implemented it.
- gcr 10y agoI don't think I quite get this. Everything I paste here shows up in plain text. It doesn't automatically do any syntax highlighting; it only seems to work if you're already copying rich text to begin with.
- kahseng 10y agoI guess I have to do better on the value proposition. Yes, there are many other of pastebins that work on code or plaintext for syntax highlighting (which might be the use case you're thinking of), but there is virtually no solution that works on rich text. Pasting rich text into any of these solutions wouldn't work, and many times I would love to keep the styles and just make the content readable (e.g. tables, paragraphs, headers, stay the same etc.)
- H4CK3RM4N 10y agoDoes Sublime Text's syntax highlighting count as rich text for this?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Nadya 10y agoNot by default. But you can install a plugin: http://monkeyhacks.com/post/sublime-text-3-copy-as-rtf-and-html-with-sublimehighlight http://monkeyhacks.com/post/sublime-text-3-copy-as-rtf-and-h...
- clishem 10y agoThis. There's absolutely no formatting, and pictures don't get pulled if I simply copy & paste. E.g. https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAwO8FEw https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAwO8FEw
- kahseng 10y agoWhich page did you do this on? You might need to use the browser extension for some pages. Some styles do not transfer without it. I can show you what it looks like with my browser extension if you let me know the URL you tried this on?
- wjdp 10y agoTook a little while to work out how cool this is, initially just thought it was just-another-pastebin.
- kahseng 10y agoThanks! Exactly... it's not and you should really give the browser extension a go if you enjoy it. It has 70% of the features coded up and works the best.
- mbayer 10y agoInteresting and simple concept, works great. Reminds me of a similar service I saw a few weeks ago, txt.fyi.
- kahseng 10y agoYep, I saw that and this was about 80% built at the time. Was still wrangling with all the style capture and couldn't capitalize on all the attention it was getting then. ;-) But this has a different primary use-case, more on transient context sharing, and caring about accuracy in the short term. And not about publishing per se.
- mbayer 10y agoYou're right, the transient nature of this service sets it apart from other similar offerings. I like your monetization approach and how you tied it to a useful feature. Great implementation.
- dimasf 10y agoSo I tried copying the site with fixed header and it broke the layout of your site - http://imgur.com/a/OADih http://imgur.com/a/OADih Otherwise, I like it for its simplicity.
- kahseng 10y agoHeh thanks yeah the nature of content editable. If you can still submit (use keyboard to tab-enter), it'll hopefully preserve that fixed hleader in the paste.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago> the hassle of secure clean-up within minutes. The people that professionally create a hassle of security will beg to differ. Edit: So just ignore them when they do that.
- bootsz 10y agoCouldn't help myself... http://imgur.com/a/7j5RH http://imgur.com/a/7j5RH Kidding aside, this is a cool idea
- olalonde 10y agoPro-tip: be careful when you copying websites you are logged into as you could leak CSRF/authentication tokens.
- math0ne 10y agoLook idea, but I think it needs a better explanation, its a relatively complicated concept.
- nmstoker 10y agoAnyone else getting a certificate warning on mobile Chrome?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kahseng 10y agoI used Let's Encrypt and don't see the error myself on mobile Chrome (latest version).
- amree 10y agoI'm seeing it too. Chrome on Android.
- kahseng 10y agoJust checked and it worked on my Android's Chrome too. Any details on what the error message says?
- ritonlajoie 10y agoNet::err_cert_authority_invalid
- kahseng 10y agoYup this should be fixed now, thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13945560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13945560.
- justusthane 10y agoWow, this is amazing. Seems like magic once I wonderstood what it does. Like others here, at first I thought it was just another pastebin. I didn't realize what it could do until I read your comment here in this thread. Seems dumb, but I didn'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? Also, any plans for a Firefox extension? Note: "Wonderstood" was a typo, but I'm leaving it because I like it :)
- kahseng 10y agoPoint taken and thanks for the positivity! Had been balancing utility and explanation, and can swing more a little to the latter. Yes Firefox shouldn't be too hard, I don't use anything too Chrome specific, and I have built extensions for FF and Safari prior (wink wink).
- audiodude 10y agoI also came to the comments for examples because I didn't realize there was anything below the fold, FWIW
- kahseng 10y agoFirefox extension out soon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/context-ctxt-io/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/context-ctxt-... It was harder that I thought, lots of quirks and behavioral differences even though the APIs used were relatively simple. Needed for example `e.preventDefault()`, requiring `<all_urls>` (unfortunately! - but that might allow me to allow copying styles from selection) and a bunch of style fixes just to get to parity.
- lutusp 10y ago> share context of whatever you see with others in seconds ITYM "within seconds, share with others the context of whatever you see". Yes?
- Svenskunganka 10y agoThis is very well made, I'm going to add this to my bookmarks. Thank you & good job!
- racl101 10y agoWoah! What sorcery is this?
- aryamaan 10y agoYea, could someone give a good explanation of what's happening here.
- nperez 10y agoBasically this http://stackoverflow.com/a/29094545 http://stackoverflow.com/a/29094545 Rich text format supports font colors, images etc Pasting this in a browser is explained well here http://stackoverflow.com/a/30904519 http://stackoverflow.com/a/30904519
- mcpherrinm 10y agoYour TLS configuration is broken, in a way that often happens: You aren't serving the appropriate intermediates. It's only serving the leaf certificate, but should also serve intermediates that get us to a trusted root. Because browsers cache intermediates, this obscures the problem much of the time. This is pretty amazing though. I copied some Go code from Gogland and got it in a browser, syntax highlighting and all! https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAwO9VEA https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAwO9VEA
- kahseng 10y agoThanks for this great feedback and TLS tip. I'm using GAE to host this, and it only has these options https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAACLGEg https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAACLGEg. Do you think this is broken or how I generated the cert? I think I followed instructions from here to get the certs: https://github.com/arkarkark/letsencrypt-nosudo https://github.com/arkarkark/letsencrypt-nosudo but I can try all this again. edit: Looks like this is the solution, thanks for pointing this problem out: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17746643/how-to-set-the-intermediate-certificates-on-gae http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17746643/how-to-set-the-i...
- itsutsu 10y agoI'm not quite sure I understand how you've done it but it's really nice (although I'm also concerned about cookie, csrf token issues as well).
- rectangletangle 10y agoI really like the clean UI first layout, but it could use an arrow/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!
- simplehuman 10y agoIs this the best site ever? Scrolled a bit and I completely got what it does
- thewavelength 10y agoI still don'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'm using Firefox with uBlock and Disconnect. Example page: https://www.golem.de/ticker/ https://www.golem.de/ticker/ - I tried to copy some listed links but they just look like standard Times New Roman after contextification: https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAAPxhEA https://ctxt.io/2/AAAAAPxhEA Anyway, nice idea. I have ever used screenshots so far.
- brcha 10y agoI believe ctxt.io requires Chrome extension to work properly. It does seam like a good method for sharing web pages, but, as I too use Firefox, not the thing for me (for now).
- dmlittle 10y agoIt doesn't. It works well for me (using Chrome 56.0.2924.87) and I don't have the extension.
- mbrookes 10y agoSame. Something is broken. Also using FireFox...
- kahseng 10y agoYep, discovered Firefox doesn't copy styles the same way as other webkit-based browsers like Chrome/Safari. Working on a Firefox extension which will solve all this, but even that has been a ton of quirks to deal with. 7% of my visitors used FF, 20% Safari and 66% Chrome, so I think my prioritization so far made sense. Will keep you posted on an FF extension.
- thewavelength 10y agoWow, didn't know that the usage of Firefox is that low. Thanks for clarification - makes sense.
- 10y ago