I don't have the ability to downvote your comment but if I could I would.
This sort of suggestion of niche web sites (by different people) that I basically would have never comes across except through some recommendation is something that I highly value HN for.
I agree that I'm stretching it here - personal directories are my personal niche and definitely something that I'm seeing everywhere - even in this little link-sharing tool.
But I figure that I'll put the thought out there and people can agree or disagree. Glad for you to voice your disagreement - I may need to tone it down.
It’s a fine line and I apologize if I was being harsh.
I’m not speaking for the original author, but from my own experience, getting to the front page of HN is very difficult, and I’ve noticed a fair few people (not blaming you) who have been advertising their own products on somebody else’s post.
It’s sort of like gaming the system. It’s not fair to the original author since the conversation can get sidetracked from his project to the project being linked.
It’s like jumping the queue. Actually I am not blameless here, I inadvertently did the same until I realized what I was doing was wrong —- it’s not something I think comes readily to the mind of the normal reader, but for any of those looking to promote it becomes obvious.
Again it’s a fine line. It’s an issue with HN having a large audience, no ads and a relatively cheap (well basically free) way to advertise ones work. Same thing happens with reddit; and now I have heard that some of moderators there are taking kickbacks by allowing / disallowing certain posts.
Ok you’ve convinced me - thank you for taking the time to explain in detail! At least on Show HN posts, I now see that this is rude. Apologies to the original author and thank you for the helpful tone.
For the record, I learned how to code less than 2 years ago, next to my full time job.
I rarely have the time to complete a side project, so I challenged myself to make a functional website in a weekend.
The idea was simple, to be able to create a short URL to share a list of websites.
It's not revolutionary, but I was surprised not to find more sites to do that. Bit.ly had such a system a few years ago called "Bundles", which they shut down.
I often see interesting lists on Twitter or in articles, but keeping track of all this is sometimes complicated. That's where I got the idea.
So I created Multy over a weekend and was thrilled to see that I could make a functional site, no matter how small, in such a short period of time.
I still have a lot of ideas to improve it, such as adding private links, or a very simple statistics system.
I would like as much as possible not to create an authentication system and keep the concept as simple as possible.
I haven't necessarily thought about monetization, but there may be some ideas! I didn't create it to make a fortune anyway.
I would like to have your opinion on its current version, and on the evolutions I could bring to it.
Thank you for reading me and taking the time to test Multy!
This looks perfect for remote learning. Teachers typically have a bunch of resources that they want to use for the class they're teaching, and sometimes their link is going to be in printed material that the student will have to type in. This seems like a nice solution to that problem.
Currently I use bit.ly for this, but it means generating lots of links. What is helpful on bit.ly is the bookmarklet. Being able to add a link to a bundle from a bookmarklet would be quite nice if you haven't done it already.
This is something I didn't think about but you're absolutely right.
I need to find a solution to edit the list. In your example, if a teacher want to add something in the middle of the year or update a website, it would be useful.
If I don't want to add an authentication system, maybe with a token...
Linktree is incredibly popular. What I've never quite understood is the number of people that have a linktree with one of the links pointing to their homepage. Why don't they just host the lot on their own homepage, if they have one?
Really nice project! I love that you built and launched something over the weekend. I remember how liberating the feeling was when I realized I could make some corner of the Internet my own.
Also minor suggestion - I might list a couple more examples with links or make the link more prominent, as my eye didn't immediately catch the "see an example" button. The overall UI is fantastic.
I use a Chrome Extension called OneTab that allows me to collapse all of my tabs into a list. You can also "Share as webpage" but the design leaves a lot to be desired. Congrats on the project!
This is such a great idea. So much nicer to include a single link at the bottom of a comment for all mentioned references. For that usage it might be nice to be able to refer to each link as say [1], [2], [3] and have those numbers also show up in the multi-link page.
Sorry, I didn't do a great job explaining what I meant. Really just comes down to having each link on the multi-link page listed with a number beside its title.
---
Typically[1] i'll put numbers inline[2] for each reference I make[3]. And then at the bottom of the comment just list them as so:
[1] www.typical.com
[2] www.inline.com
[3] www.make.com
---
But if I replace the listed references with a single link at the bottom of the page to your site:
References can be found here: https://multy.me/M9MU0A
Then it would be nice if the individual numbers (1,2,and 3) were obvious on that linked page beside each reference. But it's not a huge difference, it was just an initial thought when I first tried out your site. It's still useful even without numbered links, and I can't guess how many people would use them.
Ok I understand! Easier than I thought ;) Being able to have numbered links is definitely something I can do. I'll add that to my to-do list! It could be an option, not necessarily visible by default.
Pretty cool; reminds me of Insight Browser's multiple tab behavior. [1] For example, the browser has a functionality that when you load HN, it automatically opens the first few links in separate tabs.
I don't know if there's enough overlap in what you do that you could work with them (maybe via deep linking with fallback?), but it'd be interesting! They're a cool group of founders (YC W19, I think), and their extensible mobile browser is now my go-to on iOS.
For a few days now I've been thinking about an API system allowing users to create lists directly, without going through Multy. With a POST that would return a unique link to a JSON. This would allow people to integrate their own system to their site/application.
If I had to monetize a part of Multy, maybe it would be this API, I don't know what you think?
Thank you for your report, I'll try to fix the issues you mentioned.
For the last one, it takes some times because I verify the metadata from the URLs, and check if the website exists. I don't know if it's a good idea but this is how it works right now. And this is why you see the target url with a 301.
I don't want users to do link cloaking on Multy and if people click on something on Multy, they are aware of where they're going.
This is why I do that, and this is why I also want to integrate a domain blacklist.
Good question and right now I don't have an answer... I thought about checking a blacklist before create any list but I had trouble to find a good domain blacklist.
We can always handle spam with checking IP / number of requests but it's easy to say ;)
Just to keep you aware, this is a problem you probably need to solve sooner rather than later.
When you're discovered by spammers they will use your service to mask their true domain and share to social media sites which will in due course blacklist your domain. :-(
If volumes are low enough just now I'd consider some kind of manual moderation.
(Maybe you could use the referrer header, detect if the user has come from somewhere else and demand moderation for that case v.s. direct link emailed to a group)
I would love a browser add-on to go with this to gather up the links as you browse. I used to do this with mailephant (now defunct) that allowed me to queue up links and snippets of text related to links in a nice list to email along with an email template. good work and definitely useful.
You might be looking for something like One-Tab.[1] In addition to saving groups of tabs, you can share links to the groups of tabs. That being said, it may not 100% fit your use-case.
For reference, the original author did a Show HN when they released One-Tab.[2]
https://histre.com/ might be what you're looking for. You can save your browsing history (tree-style) via open-source browser extensions, take notes on the links, add highlights, and share them as a notebook either publicly or privately.
Yeah its not that bad, here is a simple bookmarklet example that grabs current url and posts it to your endpoint (mailephant in this case). Might be a good first step.
Hello! This thread is no longer on the front page, but just to keep the few people still passing by, I finally created a browser extension! It completes the site :)
In my experience, every developer that I hired self-taught was 10x better at solving problems and getting things done themselves than traditionally taught.
* https://tray.club - like this, but allows subpages and notes areas.
* https://gossipsweb.net - pay $1 to be in this directory ('cozy web'-type vibe)
* https://terra.finzdani.net - personal directory
* https://marijn.uk/linkroll/ - another one
* https://href.cool/ - mine
But I love the simplicity of Multy - dump your links and click create. Great work.