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Show HN: Smort.io – Edit, annotate and share articles easily (smort.io)

86 points by sabr ↗ HN
Hey HN, I created Smort as I wanted to highlight an article and share it with a friend but couldn't find an easy way of doing it.

Smort lets you easily edit, annotate and share an article. To read any article, just prepend smort.io/ before a URL in a browser. (I recently found out that even 12ft.io/ uses the same technique). Smort is free to use and shareable links are valid for 7 days from creation. Permanent links will be supported soon.

I'm primarily a backend/ML engineer so had to learn all things frontend to build Smort. I started out developing in SvelteKit and loved it but later migrated to React & Nextjs due to better third party library support. I have lots of ideas on how to take Smort forward and would love for you all to use it. Please join our Discord to share your curated articles and feedback!

This is a walkthrough article detailing everything Smort can do at the moment - https://smort.io/demo-walkthrough.

Smort's name was inspired by the memes [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=smort+meme&tbm=isch

37 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] thread
randomluck040
How does snort.io compare to hypothes.is which is open source?
sabr
Hey, thanks for your question. A couple of points -

1) You don't need to make an account & download an extension for Smort

2) Ads don't show up in Smort

3) You can actually edit the article content in Smort using Markdown. Please see https://www.smort.io/demo-walkthrough for all that is possible

4) You can customize your font size, style and theme with Smort

randomluck040
Thanks for answering - I have learned about Hypothes.is just a few days back and looking through the thread, there are many alternatives to Hypothes.is apparently and all of them seem different in their own way. Best of luck with your project! :)
Eddy_Viscosity2
Cool, I was trying it out but couldn't annotate. I could highlight and remove highlights but not add anything else. For example, to add _ to bold. I type '_' and nothing happens. Am I missing something?
sabr
Hey, thanks for checking it out!

To convert text to bold, please enclose it in two asterisks *. https://www.smort.io/demo-walkthrough#e00c6e0c-c2be-48e4-9f9... mentions how to convert to do it. To get it working on mobile you might need to add or delete a space at the start of end of the *.

I should probably add a button in the text selection menu bar to italicize/convert it to bold directly

Eddy_Viscosity2
I'm using chrome from a PC. There's a text selection menu bar?

I got some of it working, I can add text to everything but the opening 'slide' with the blue background.

thanks

sabr
Oh that should be a lot easier to use then. Sorry I think I didn't explain it correctly. By "text selection menu bar" I mean the floating action menu that shows up when you select any text.

Yes the opening slide with the blue background is the article header which is fixed and can't be edited.

Thanks for your feedback!

sabr
Hey, I've pushed a new version with buttons for bold, italics, strike-through and underline that show up in the floating menu once you select text.

Hopefully it's now easier for you to annotate. Let me know what you think of the changes :)

sideproject
Nice tool! I'm sure you're thinking of it, but are you planning on a Chrome extension for this? :)

Speaking of articles and annotations, I've also recently launched a project (a little different) which allows annotate and read research papers (PDFs) easily if anyone is interested.

https://scholars.io

sabr
Hey, thanks for using Smort! Yes, browsers extensions are next in line! Scholars.io looks nice too :)
justsomeuser
Do you plan to charge in the future?
sabr
Currently shared links are valid for 7 days from creation. That will always be free. Depending on how prohibitive it is for me to pay for storage, I might have to charge for creating a lot of permanent shared links. But most users should be able to use Smort for free.

The bottom line is that all the upcoming features mentioned on the home page https://smort.io/ and a lot more won't be charged.

guyzyl
Sounds like someone is a fan of Brooklyn 99 :)
sabr
Haha, actually I didn't know that there are many references to Smort in Brooklyn 99! Will definitely check out the show :)
thumb
Nice! Smort!

I'm excited to try it out when I get off work.

sabr
Thank you! It would be great if you could share feedback via email, Discord or Twitter!
layer8
It even works on itself: https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io

But another level of recursion seems to lose the content: https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io/https:/smort.io

sabr
Yes, since the actual content in the first recursive level is minimal, the parsing algorithm doesn't render it in the second level. I should include an easter egg in when you run it recursively :)
layer8
I’d just redirect the second level to the first (could happen by accident when using a JS bookmark or similar), i.e. redirect https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io/https:/whatever to https://www.smort.io/https:/whatever, but continue to allow https://www.smort.io/https:/smort.io (because why not, there can be valid use cases).
sabr
Check it out now! Inspired by @guyzl, I added a Brooklyn 99 Easter Egg
layer8
Noice. :)

Another thing: At least on iOS, I get what looks like two overlapping scroll bars. I guess the thicker yellow one is from smort.io, but it’s confusing, and they are slightly out of sync with each other. :)

sabr
I'm not able to reproduce this on iOS. If you're okay, do you mind sending me a screenshot of the issue via email [1] or Twitter DM [2]?

[1] hello@smort.io [2] https://twitter.com/SmortApp/

shermablanca
Are you in the Bay Area? Would like to discuss a potential talk at Reactathon (IRL, outdoors -- https://reactathon.com) if you're interested!
sabr
Hey, yes I am. I would love to speak at Reactathon :) Please email me at hello@smort.io
jack335
This is really really cool! Good job
rushmore_
This is really well made, kudos! Wondering if there's a way to see the list of articles I have annotated?
sabr
Thank you! Yes, I plan to add a "home page" to see all your shared articles in one place
mgirkins
This looks really well made, congratulations!

I have been working on a similar tool that lets you annotate anything online and have discussions. Conote is focused mainly on the discussion aspect and the annotation is more of a tool to aid discussion.

https://conote.page

sabr
Thank you! Conote looks great too! I like emphasis on discussion
infotropy
As a small suggestion, I would show any edits to the text of a smort’d article in another color and state that in the banner. It’s far to easy to completely rewrite an article, share it, and claim that it was from the source. I know, it’s kind of an edge case of a bad actor. And yes, I know you could do this through other methods, just would be a nice feature to not only deter said bad actor but also let me know what I edited.
sabr
This is a good idea. I didn't think about it from a disinformation point of view. I'll implement this soon.

Thanks for the suggestion!

infotropy
The more I thought about it, the more I thought that this would just be a nice addition just to show me what I edited. Kills two birds with one stone, disinformation and edit highlighting. Neat tool though.
sabr
Thanks! I should have this up and running tomorrow/day after. Is there a way I can update you when it's released?
derekzhouzhen
A bookmarklet shall be good enough for most people, since you are only passing the URL.
sabr
Yes, true. I'll get it done before a browser extension