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Show HN: I built Multy – Generate a short URL to share a list of websites (multy.me)
128 points by Etheon on Jan 22, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 60 comments



Another great example of how miniature personal directories are experiencing a comeback.

* 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.


It's not immediately obvious to me what href.cool is.


Click on the train icon next to "www."


This is an obvious subtle example of thread high jacking, masquerading as a helpful comment, but aimed at getting traffic to your website.

Should be against the rules. I don’t have the ability to report, hence posting here


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.


Hello HN :)

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...


Great job and great idea! Such a great idea it’s a successful company: https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/26/linktree-raises-10-7m-for-...

Keep it up!


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?


I think it's used on a lot of social media platforms like TikTok where the users are used to a quick click kind of interaction.


Probably an aesthetic decision, or the overhead of changing the site?


Didn't know linktree, more user centric but really cool! I can't dream of half of their success but who knows ^^


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.


Thank you for your feedback! Yep you're right the link is a little bit small and users can easily miss it, I'll try to find a better solution!


People seemed to like the project, so I created a page on product hunt,I'll see how it goes ^^ https://www.producthunt.com/posts/multy


Awesome first project; if you need those other features you mentioned you could just use pastebin.com iirc


This is awesome, I'm using it to group links for different cool TLDs (.fyi, .career, .fund, .finance)


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!


Thank you :) Didn't know OneTab but it looks really useful for a guy like me with 100 open tabs.

I will check if I can create my own browser extension!


You might like this: https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/


ctrl+f'ed for OneTab before I posted incase it was a dupe. It is a great extension and you make a good point. Ideally it'd be as easy to edit as this.


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.


Thank you :)

So for example multy.me/xXere-1 and you'll be able to go directly to the link?


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.

1: https://insightbrowser.com/


Thanks! And yes this is interesting.

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?


Some bugs:

When clicking the grid view, it does not work with åäö. And probably other character as well.

https://multy.me/x7R7AB

If I add two urls, most of the time, the last one does not show up.

If i add a URL that has a 301 to another url, it's the target url, not the one i entered, that get's published.

When clicking "create list" it takes 5-8 seconds before the list is created. This seems like a long time for such a simple operation.


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.


Are there publicly available domain blacklists? I am curious on you would implement such a thing. Would you care to share?


Well, I am looking for this type of tool since this morning ^^

I found several BL, mostly for email spam protection but:

http://uribl.com/ https://www.spamhaus.org/

The difficulty is to found how to work with the database and check each URI.

I found some packages on npm like this one : https://www.npmjs.com/package/dnsbl-lookup

But I have to test it thoroughly before putting it into production.


I found this one (just by googling, no reference): https://github.com/Ultimate-Hosts-Blacklist/Ultimate.Hosts.B...


Wow thank you, seems awesome!!!


Looks great. Congratulations on getting it out so fast. I wish I had your drive (and skills).

What is your plan to deal with spam or abuse of the service?


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 agree. I found this package https://github.com/Planeshifter/node-spam-detector

I'll check if it's outdated, and I'll try to build my own system.


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]

[1]: https://www.one-tab.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5356823


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.

For example, here is a public notebook: https://histre.com/pub/notebooks/zk4s2695/product-road-map-t...


I just tried it out and it works. https://multy.me/l3uepo


Hey that's a great idea!

I never built an add-on for a browser so it will make a good challenge. Maybe for this week-end ^^


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.

  javascript:q=location.href;if(document.getSelection)%7Bd=document.getSelection();
  %7Delse%7Bd='';%7D;p=document.title;void(open('https://mailephant.email/views/curate.html? 
  showtags=yes&url='+encodeURIComponent(q)+'&description='+encodeURIComponent(d)+'&
  title='+encodeURIComponent(p),'Mailephant','toolbar=no,scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=700'));


I had to add some newlines to your JS because it was borking the page layout. Sorry; it's our bug. One of these days we will fix it.


You just save that as a new bookmark after updated your endpoint and you can gather that data quickly.


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 :)

https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/multy/

I'll send it to Google for Chrome as well


Thank you for the tips! I will definitely try that this week end and keep you updated.


Nice! This is very similar to https://tab.bz


I entered `twitter.com`, it says invalid URL.


If I enter `https://twitter.com/`, it gets cut off.


Hmmmm this is weird, the metadata scrapper seems to have issue with twitter, it seems to work fine with any other websites I tried...

I'll check asap and try to fix it :) Thanks for the report


Any plans to open source?


Well as it's one of my first "big" project as a developper, it can be scary, but my github project is public https://github.com/Etheonor/multy.me

Feel free to check it and I will be happy to have some feedback on my code. Since I'm self-taught, I'm sure I make big mistakes!


In my experience, every developer that I hired self-taught was 10x better at solving problems and getting things done themselves than traditionally taught.


I heard that a lot, but the impostor syndrome is always strong when you didn't do anything publicly before!


I second this. I went to college to study CS but most of my time learning to program was largely "self taught" lol.




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