angilly
Joined 19 years ago
Joined 19 years ago
> The “benefits” REST is supposed to introduce
Is one of the more egregious straw men I’ve seen in a while. Never once in my twenty years have I heard anyone say it’s nice because “you don’t have to read the docs” or “it works in a browser”
REST helps with lots from thinking through clean data models to helping ensure consistency within an API.
So is the joke that is this wouldn't happen if their blog was hosted on a dapp?
I looked around for a solution like this for a while last year while building a new weekly email for Ramen[1]. I tried a bunch of services but ran up against a bunch of issues mentioned in this thread:
- GET query string character limit
- Stress around unreliability of free alternatives
- Need to be able to handle large spikes of image generation when sending emails
So I ended up building a service and turning it into a freemium product: ChartURL.com[2]
It is:
- Free for low usage w/ branding
- Based on C3.js[3] (for major flexibility)
- Supports datamaps.github.io[4]
- Has an API whereby you can POST huge datasets and get back a short URL that can be used in an img tag
- Supports retina & `srcset` via a `retina=1` option
You need to sign the URLs which means it's not a simple "just drop the data in the URL" but it's close.
I'll hang out in the comments here for a while if any of you want to ask questions about it.
[1] https://ramen.is
Ooof. Terrifying.
We had a last-minute standoff with Facebook over some permissions issues. That delay meant that we weren't able to start asking our customers far enough in advance, and we could not delay our launch of Amplify because it was tied to announcing our Segment.com integration.
However, towards the bottom of the landing page, you can see how we were able to use the technique to trend on LinkedIn back when we launched our core product a couple months ago. Unfortunately, in that campaign, we were not tracking clicks correctly, so we can't share any hard data. Anecdotally, several companies told us they came across Ramen through that campaign, which is why we were confident that building and launching Amplify was the right move.
I look forward to a day when we can provide a great case study backed by data :)
EDIT: Forgot "announcing" before "our Segment.com..."
One of the guys who built Amplify here. We posted on Product Hunt yesterday, so some of you might have seen us there, but for those that haven't, some background:
Amplify is something that we've had in the back of our heads for a while. We built a hack version of it for our own launches, and when we told other founders, marketers, and product people about it, we got lots of "huh... yeah that's awesome... can I use it?" type responses.
While there are other services out there like that allow "group social scheduling" like Thunderclap & GaggleAmp, Amplify differentiates itself in that it focuses on the product/customer relationship.
We've had success internally with a previous version of Amplify, and now we're happy to offer it to the world.
Let me know if you have any questions!