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Show HN: Sitekite – Imgur for Websites (sitekite.com)
114 points by coldicetea on Jan 3, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 53 comments


Nice idea, congrats on shipping.

You might want to fix this though http://sitekite.com/hello-world-2o5f7g



On a similar topic, I seem to have broken something by putting a javascript:alert in the embed field:

http://sitekite.com/test-V2IjEA


Haha, that's always the first thing I check for. :)

http://sitekite.com/my-kickass-website-m0uAPw


yea, I'd second the xss, since using rails one sanitize call should be enough.


And setting user cookies to HTTP only.


I don't see the appeal behind this.

The reason why there was a need for off-site image hosting is because people and websites like reddit didn't want to pay for the bandwidth or be forced to deal with takedown requests.

A decade ago, bandwidth was much more expensive, and it was only because it got much cheaper that imgur's business model of allowing free direct linking is even possible now.

If I want to share an address with someone, there's nothing wrong with a google maps link. There are hundreds of websites out there that allow you to host text or blog.


I could see this being useful to quickly put up some info about an upcoming event or meeting.

>> There are hundreds of websites out there that allow you to host text or blog.

Blog sites typically need signup, so are slower to get started with than this. Also if you think of something like Blogger, it would not be as clean/minimal out of the box if you just want a clean 'single page' to link someone to.

Pastebin-style hosting can be no-signup but is typically uglier than this, and usually doesn't allow you to embed images/maps.


> Blog sites typically need signup, so are slower to get started with than this. Also if you think of something like Blogger, it would not be as clean/minimal out of the box if you just want a clean 'single page' to link someone to.

If you care that little about the way you are presenting your information that you can't even be bothered to sign up, you most likely don't care about having fancy HTML formatting.

The reason why most blogs require you to sign up is so they can ban you when you start putting up phishing, cookie stuffing, or exploit pages.

Also here is one that I found from a single search. http://www.c99.nl/


>> If you care that little about the way you are presenting your information that you can't even be bothered to sign up, you most likely don't care about having fancy HTML formatting.

Who says choosing Sitekite would mean I care little about presentation? Sitekite does a better job than (to use my original example, Blogger) for its intended 'share a single page of info' use-case.

>> The reason why most blogs require you to sign up is so they can ban you when you start putting up phishing, cookie stuffing, or exploit pages.

As a user, I don't care about that, I just don't want to have to signup to yet-another-thing just to share some info with my friends/colleagues.

>> Also here is one that I found from a single search. http://www.c99.nl/

Ugly.


> Who says choosing Sitekite would mean I care little about presentation? Sitekite does a better job than (to use my original example, Blogger) for its intended 'share a single page of info' use-case.

The intersection of people who are able to write their own HTML but absolutely refuse to sign up with a fake email, or get their own VPS really comes down to 2 types of people.

Paranoids

Phishers

Both of which are tiny minorities.

> Ugly.

And how is this relevant when you are writing raw html?


You cannot compare those things like that. Not being willing to make all your contributions to a site with the same account or maybe even to have that information displayed to the public has nothing to do with laziness. It can be a matter of privacy or security. As a user I myself see no benefit (i don't even know the password of this HN account).


The appeal is the simplicity. And certainly there are users who would like a decently formatted HTML page without signing up; hence the whole "imgur for websites" approach.


I actually created a site for hosting text (that looked pretty) that doesn't require signup and is very minimal and clean: http://www.millisay.com

Right now it doesn't support any markdown or image embedding mainly because not too many people use it, but I wouldn't be opposed to adding it if users saw the need.


I like this, but I can't think of the use case where I would actually use it. I'll think about it as I'm living my everyday internet life and see if I can find one, because I love the easy "create and share" concept generally.

What's the use case you imagined when you built it? What need did you have?


I didn't make it, but sometimes I write a guide on something (like how to read x-men comics) and want to share it with friends, being able to slap it up in Markdown on a website to link to people is really nice.


Github gists would be decent for that.


Github requires users to be logged in to an account. That's a hurdle and very anti-privacy.


It doesn't?


I meant for posting, I thought that would be clear.


Gists can be posted anonymously.


I think on it as "pastebin" for writing with asteroids.


I see it as a rich alternative to sharing a text on Pastebin. Congrats on shipping, and nice execution. Let's see if it sticks on.


Not important, but could you please add some Terms of Service? I'd like to know who has ownership of the uploaded information, whether your servers are in the US (DMCA), etc.

As a suggestion: make a bookmarklet to quickly share highlighted text/images from a website. That'd be great.


Might be good to include some example usages?

I created one http://sitekite.com/foshizzle-daZeYw but I'm not creative enough to think of clever uses.


I completely agree. Sitekite seems cool, but I'm not sure when I would use this over just sending text, images, or maps directly to be people.


Since they're calling it "imgur for websites", I'm guessing they intend for you to put pertinent stuff up there and link to it from high-traffic sites like this or reddit.

If they provided an API, it would be cool for barebones notifications from automated systems too.


Joncp, An API is actually the second-to-top thing on my todo list.


What's the top thing?


The ability to upload your own pictures.


>barebones notifications from automated systems too

Could you please explain what you meant?


Here's some ideas I had after looking at this wonder what you think?

1. if you added a login + uploads and this could be used as a super simple alternative to document sharing.

2. Add page versioning and this could work as a wiki.

3. Add notifications and teams could use it for managing internal documents, photos, etc.

4. I think if search we're added theres tons of possibilities though you might not want to go there..


http://sitekite.com/here-is-a-quickly-made-site-_uitRw

"We're sorry, but something went wrong. If you are the application owner check the logs for more information."


This could be very handy when I just need to get something online, and it's not just code or an image, but don't feel like hosting it myself.

One thing: It really needs some kind of preview before creating the site.


How will you deal with spam, torrents, child porn, etc?


Is there an API / webservice that could help developers check for the latest torrents / binaries / badstuff and prevent that upload? The millions of dollars that went into copyright wars certainly brought up something useful, but I can not find it.

Or is the dmca-related workload just the right anti-growth measure to prevent interesting new things coming up?

How do you explain this to your investors: "The site is technically ok and we are growing, but we need money for some people to handle dmca requests and this kills our business modell."

So many cool ideas are blocked because of the retarded dinosaur-politics of corporate stalinism. We need a real breakthrough here for a jump to the next level. Current copyright laws are protecting the wealth of a very small group of people but do seriously damage the development of new industries and thousands of jobs. Stupid.


♬its fun to deal with the dmca


Good work, very nicely done. This has great potential especially for online marketing. Imagine being able to put together a new deal site or ad within minutes and sharing it on all social media channels. Some sort of basic logging/Analytics could be sold as a paid service. Future enhancements could be login, draft/publish mode, multi-user/collaboration, logging/analytics.


One tiny qualm! The dragging on the "Text | Map | Embed" is too sensitive. Usually when most people click, their mouse goes up a few pixels from the the pressure of them pushing down on the mouse button. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't click on the buttons, until I realized it was dragging the entire box because my mouse moved slightly when I clicked!


This has potential. When drop.io died nothing filled the gap. If you want some help with this feel free to reach out to me: rrggrr@gmx.us


I used drop.io a bit while it was alive, and it was really useful. I was sad when it went away. I hope more sites like this (anonymous use, quick to create and share something) pop up!


It would be great to have a quick rendering on the side and split the site in half, left side editing, right side live preview.


Sounds interesting! But you should change your CSS for the links. It is not really pleasant and not very practical not to know which text is clickable. Try to find the only link of my site at first glance... http://sitekite.com/find-the-link-npxtDQ


I edited my site and then its address changed... Is it normal? "Find the link" is now at this address: http://sitekite.com/find-the-link-mxOa_Q


Yes, your link edit caused app error when clicked the older one. This is not very SEO friendly but hey, just launched! Congrats.

By the way, it's evidently that the linked word is "here" :) (they should solve that too).


Yup, thanks for the tip. Just fixed both.


Cool!

- oEmbed support would probably make things more useful for users.

- Here is a way for you to add a "Form" button where users can quickly create and add forms to their pages: http://www.jotform.com/anywhere/


Not sure how I'd be able to edit the site later without a login?


I created a simple "Sitekite 101" site here: http://sitekite.com/sitekite-101-nHOC0g


It looks great, congrats on shipping.

Maybe an option to email an auth token in case the cookie is lost so you can continue editing? Or maybe just a password/key.


Seems like this would be a good alternative/second source for a Facebook event page. You can post all of the same things and embed a map.


I read the description on the site and said "I love this thing," without even testing it.

Edit: Now After Testing.

Wow, how delightful.


Works great on mobile. Great job!




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