Show HN: Programmable “link preview” thumbnails for your websites
thumbsmith.comHi HN,
I posted this a while back when I had just a small MVP and a had a little bit of feedback from here. A month of development later during Christmas, new years, and a lockdown, my first ever "API-like" service looks much more solid, and I would love to get some more honest feedback from the community here!
It's a tool that lets you easily add these dynamic "Link preview" thumbnails to your site's pages. This way, when links to your site are shared on the internet, a nice, on-brand, tailored picture can be shown instead of a generic image or nothing at all.
There is a really nice CLI based on vitejs you can try out to help with making the thumbnails.
How does it work ?
In short, you provide the service with some custom HTML/CSS templates, then a simple, public-facing "API" will be created for each template. This "API" will return rendered pictures of the templates dynamically based on the variables you prodive via query parameters - all in a scalable, production-ready way. You don't have to manage anything else.
Once you created and uploaded a template, you just need to "Hook up" the templates to your pages via meta tags in your site's <head>. You can use your framework / environment of choice to create the URL strings, passing variables to your templates via query string parameters.
Let me know what you think, thank you so much!
No traction... Will try again tomorrow! :(