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Don't try this at home (just get Embedly)

Launching Banterly last week was a thrill. It was unbelievably fun meeting so many new people from all over the world through my own personal creation. Everyone was so friendly and supportive and I honestly loved every minute of it (even the parts where I was frantically fixing bugs). It was an experience I won't soon forget and hope to repeat.

Not long after I launched, the guys at Embedly started a discussion suggesting that I check out their oEmbed service. The moment I saw it, I knew it was exactly what I had been looking for. The only annoying part was that I hadn't discovered it several weeks ago when I first started working on embedded media in Banterly. So, for that reason, I decided to do a little demonstration and offer a little praise in hopes that others looking for a solution to their embedding woes might not waste time trying to roll their own (like I did).

Don't DIY

Let's start with what NOT to do. Don't try to do media embedding yourself. For starters, there are simply too many different sites out there, each with slightly different methods of exposing their data (Embedly supports more than 160 providers for free or 185 for a reasonable subscription fee). Doing it myself, it took two days to get support for images, YouTube, and the most simple OpenGraph meta tags (which was extremely flimsy since no complete HTML parsers exist for Node yet).

Additionally, doing it yourself means downloading unknown content from unknown sources at the whim of your users--not exactly the kind of thing you want to expose yourself to when all you want is to embed content on your site. In fact, I almost cut the feature before launch because I was afraid malicious users might discover it and use it to abuse the system, but then I thought--'why not?' and left it in anyway.

embedly-node

You can use Embedly to embed media from both server side and client side (via jQuery). I chose to use the server side module (embedly-node) in order to reduce the number of requests I have to make to the Embedly API and to keep page load times fast for users. Using the embedly-node module on GitHub (use npm install embedly), I ended up with something similar to the following:

var Embedly = require("embedly"); var embedly = new Embedly.api({ //key: "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX", // Embedly Pro Key user_agent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; myapp/1.0; [email protected])' }); // Do initial comment text processing // 1. Parse URLs from comment text // 2. Render HTML comment by replacing parsed URLs with anchor tags // 3. Save rendered comment HTML to the database // 4. Send rendered comment HTML to connected clients (via WebSocket) ... // 5. Try to get additional content from Embedly if (urls) { // Using Embedly oEmbed API embedly.oembed({ params: { urls: urls // Can send single URL also. }, complete: function(e, objs) { for (var i in objs) { // Returned if the URL content is not supported on free tier if (objs[i].type == "error") continue; // Some embed types don't contain a URL objs[i].url = objs[i].url || urls[i]; // Render and replace the previously rendered link html = html.replace(getLink(urls[i]), render(objs[i])); } // Only save and send to clients if the HTML has changed if (comment.html != html) { // Update the rendered HTML in the database comment.html = html; comment.save(function() { // Send updated comment HTML to connected clients (via WebSocket) ... }); } }); }

Sending the initial HTML to connected clients immediately (rather than waiting for Embedly) helps keep the UI fast and responsive while users are chatting. Once Embedly returns, new HTML is sent out to clients to replace the initial comment markup. In my tests, I found Embedly to be quite fast at returning embed data, but its speed will always be limited by how fast the URL host can return its own content, so it's much more reasonable to keep the updates separate.

A simplified version of my render function looks like this (would be admittedly much cooler with a template):

In addition to oEmbed, there are also 'preview' and 'objectify' which I have yet to explore (maybe I'll follow up if I do) but are only available for Pro Embedly users.

Thanks guys!

I also think it's worth mentioning how helpful the folks at Embedly were during the process (especially Bob Corsaro aka @doki_pen). Throughout the experience, they were extremely available (chatting on Banterly and exchanging emails late into the night). They even fixed a bug I found within minutes of reporting it!

#embedly #oembed #node.js #banterly

Beaten to the Punch (Convore vs Banterly)

I've been working on Banterly ever since I caught the startup bug at Startup School 2010. It started as a simple last minute idea to apply to Y Combinator, but has since evolved into something much more (despite not being accepted). If you haven't seen Banterly yet, go ahead and take a few minutes to check it out. Here's a link even: http://banterly.com

~ Intermission ~

Either you saw the announcement from Convore (http://convore.com) the week before last, or you don't follow startups. If you're in the latter group, you should probably just skip the rest of this and go start chatting on Banterly (or I suppose...Convore). If you're in the former, you may have taken one look at Banterly and thought "meh...this is just Convore with less features." But of course, we hope you thought "Sweet! This is what Convore should have been."

Regardless, if you're an entrepreneur like me, you can probably relate to my story. While it's normal to question any idea over the course of its development, it's also often a great source of agony and stress for would-be founders. Second guessing yourself is difficult, but even more difficult after getting rejected by Y Combinator.

However, after experiencing all of the ups and downs of startup-idea self-examination, there's one thing that's even more agonizing: being beaten to the punch. When I saw the announcement from Y Combinator about Convore less than two weeks ago, I was shattered.

In researching the space over the months we had discovered many competitors, so discovering someone else was nothing new. What made Convore different was that it was actually GOOD, it had buy-in from Paul Graham & Co., and seemed to get instant respect from people in the know--all things I felt needed to be in place to make something like Banterly successful.

Discovering that your 'revolutionary' product is suddenly a 'me too' product is a bitter pill to swallow. There's nothing like having your idea validated and taken away from you at the same time.

Somehow I resisted the urge to abandon Banterly (not easy as easy as it sounds) and have been working around the clock ever since to get something presentable ready anyway. Banterly, as we're releasing it today, is not perfect and has no shortage of bugs (which I am sure will pop up once people start using the service in greater numbers). I am the sole programmer working on it and have only limited time for it (not to mention learning Node.js + MongoDB--both new platforms for me).

So my question to the community is this: What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you cut your losses and move on to a new idea (we discovered several while working on Banterly)? Would you ignore Convore and go for it? Would you open source the code?

I also want to add one more thing. We have nothing but respect for the folks at Convore and we think their service is fantastic. Even if we end up moving on from Banterly, we're really happy that Y Combinator decided to support such an awesome team with such a great idea.

#mongodb #node.js #startups #banterly #convore #ycombinator