I had the idea for BIGWORDS.PAGE when I wanted to display a message on a tablet that I had remote management control over, but no physical access. Configuring it to be a kiosk browser is easy, but how do I get the browser to show my message? So I made the URL be the message.
It uses a URL fragment to configure the message. Browsers don't send URL fragments to the server, so I never see your message. There's no backend, and no storage.
All parameters are documented, so generating a message link is easy. There's also a built-in editor to make it extra easy.
There are a few extra features like slides, animations, and countdowns and timers. QR codes too. Not too fancy, but hopefully enough to be useful.
I know the uses for this are pretty niche. But it may be one of those things that you keep as a nugget in your brain, a tool in your back pocket. Not something you use often, but when you do it makes things just a little bit easier.
It's open source (MIT), and self-hostable if that's your thing.
LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t care about your code, but please write prose by your hands if you want us to read it.
Let me guess, you saw the `–` and thought "Clearly no human uses the em dash. It must all be AI".
I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.
For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.
My man, that web design is absolutely pure Claude.
But hey that’s ok, the app is a good idea and works well, I have no issue with that.
Clearly the person making it knows how to structure a web app and make it usable and it shows it’s not just slop.
This is good use of AI coding
Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."
Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.
I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay.
LLMs make your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.
Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.
It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.
Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.
it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words, what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.
This is neat. I'm deaf, so I have to write people all the time with big text. I have a mobile app that does this, but it's neat you have something web based. Thanks for this. I'm going to self-host it as I can see a lot of use and I don't want to spam your servers.
The hosted version runs through Cloudflare, and since it’s a static site it caches really well! Don’t ever feel bad about using the hosted version. I’m not worried about bandwidth there. (But self-hosting is fun too!)
Good work! Funnily enough, I actually very recently also made a document sharing tool with very similar approach to sharing an "app as URL", but for a different kind of use case. I'm sharing arbitrary files, code snippets and scraped articles to friends or other devices of mine.
Readability of the link itself wasn't a goal for me, so I've opted to zstd compress the content instead for shorter urls. Can still get quite big of course, depending on content. But I have successfully shared even some small image files with this.
I really like this! It's definitely useful for businesses that just need to display one thing, and don't feel like spending a ton of time designing. It would be cool if you were able to download the stuff on it, in case it needs to be printed or something like that.
Super cool! I'm using this same strategy for a recipe viewer. One thing that works pretty well is actually letting agents build the urls. As an example, I have a skill file and docs for agents on how to use it; feel free to copy how I'm doing it, it works pretty well in permission-limited agents like chatgpt web! https://keep.recipes
Really cool idea, I once came up with something similar I was calling big numbers, but in that case you would display big numbers from different integrations, sheets, notion, public github, public apis etc... Not sure how it would work but it could be an idea to get the date from some dynamic sources/integrations
I had this idea ten years ago. Told my parents it’d be nice to say “have a good day” and my moms initial reaction was she’d say “** you”. End of that idea.
I thought of something similar to both. A display would be nice but car to car/peer to peer communication would work too. It'd be a nightmare though considering I know how depraved the internet is. It's not anywhere near as anonymous but I don't think people generally care as much as they probably should.
I think BIGWORDS.PAGE would be a great companion to a web browser app on those TV devices. I haven't found any good web browser for AppleTV, but if somebody has a browser/kiosk app that let's you send a URL from your phone, that would be really great!
Unfortunately Apple TV doesn't support WebView. I'm procuring a second-hand device so I can test my app there. I'm thinking of rendering it on the server and sending a series of images. Not sure of the cost, though.
Shameless plug: I made Theopenpresenter.com that can do this. You can find the app in GoogleTV (not AppleTV due to browser limitation). And you can control it from phone or anywhere else.
Any learnings from pushing the envelope on URL payloads? Years ago I prototyped a customizable Powers of Ten-ish zoomer, with the stack of images/videos/maps/molecules specified in the URL. I should reprise it at some point if no one else does - wondering if you encountered anything unexpected, or Just Worked?
Heaps of Learnings here [0] from getting an entire games state into a url or QR code (a pretty damn complex game, 5-10 minute games comfortably fit in a QR code such that games can be replayed exactly as they happened - no server)
Main issue I encountered was pasting a big payload URL. I had to make a fallback to allow pasting in a dialog if it failed to load from the browser URL bar.
I use to try and coordinate game nights across the world, and a url with the Unix timestamp of the event and a countdown showing how many days and hours worked quite well.
That's the OG (Open Graph) Image. It's an image built into the site that's used as the thumbnail for shares on social media and messaging apps. (More info on OG Images here: https://layerre.com/glossary/open-graph-image/)
How could I change the image to be less intrusive? I can't have it show an image of the message you're trying to share, because the server never sees that message. But can I make the default image nicer on the eyes.
Completely different architecture, but would be amazing if another device could control what message (or photo, embedded video) is displayed.
There's a huge industry around digital signage and I've always felt it could be replaced with a simple Chromium kiosk + auto-refreshed webpage content. There's really no need for expensive HDMI connections or custom video streams when we already have browsers.
I worked for a company creating apps for Kiosks that used SiteKiosk. It was a tight sandbox around Internet Explorer on Windows. This was 2014. Browsers are highly viable but properly locked kiosk mode wasn't. We used custom enclosures for $$$ with micro ATX Intel. Now Raspberry Pi or smaller could run circles around those workloads.
That period was a fun time and one I think about all the time. The profit margins and costs have come down so much I don't know if an equivalent workload or company would stay afloat as long.
I'm working on TheOpenPresenter for this, do give it a try. You can pretty much open the landing page, scan the QR code and you're set. It's also open-source and pretty mature now.
145 comments
[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadIt uses a URL fragment to configure the message. Browsers don't send URL fragments to the server, so I never see your message. There's no backend, and no storage.
All parameters are documented, so generating a message link is easy. There's also a built-in editor to make it extra easy.
https://bigwords.page/#Hello,%20HN!&bg=ff6600&fg=000000&font...
There are a few extra features like slides, animations, and countdowns and timers. QR codes too. Not too fancy, but hopefully enough to be useful.
I know the uses for this are pretty niche. But it may be one of those things that you keep as a nugget in your brain, a tool in your back pocket. Not something you use often, but when you do it makes things just a little bit easier.
It's open source (MIT), and self-hostable if that's your thing.
Let me know what you think.
LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t care about your code, but please write prose by your hands if you want us to read it.
This is basically a differently-shaped https://github.com/antonmedv/textarea
Cool idea, but agree that fixing actual mistakes in the title is a worthwhile use of time.
I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.
I posted a detailed reply to your comment with lots of examples and HN's new slop filter just killed it... due to overabundance of slop.
:-)
I recommend turning on showdead to read it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002280
Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.
LLMs make your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.
Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.
It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.
Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.
You are classifying well and optimizing poorly.
In fact I employed the same idea for the slide stack site I use for teaching. Not exactly "URL is an app" but "URL is a slide"
https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/_1.html?sequence=...
The same consideration applies. No backend, no storage, also no user data collection, no authorization, no hurdles in general. Everyone can use it.
https://github.com/abejfehr/bigtext
https://www.abefehr.com/bigtext/
https://github.com/leoherzog/ParameterPage
https://parameter.page
Thanks!
Fun fact; it's not as widely usable but data URLs work for this too.
Maybe you could add an option to copy the data URL for a page?
e.g. this one
https://bigwords.page/#%23%20Gate%2012%0ABoarding%20now&bg=0...
becomes
data:text/html,<!doctype html><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><body style="margin:0;height:100vh;display:flex;flex-direction:column;align-items:center;justify-content:center;background:%230b3d91;color:%23fff;font-family:sans-serif;text-align:center"><h1 style="font-size:18vw;margin:0">Gate 12</h1><p style="font-size:9vw;margin:0">Boarding now</p>
(paste this ^^ into your URL bar)
https://linkify.ink/about
Readability of the link itself wasn't a goal for me, so I've opted to zstd compress the content instead for shorter urls. Can still get quite big of course, depending on content. But I have successfully shared even some small image files with this.
https://linkify.ink/#AgACe30otS_9YAATHRMAcsgaGHBZBwCDZiUYf1d...
We used to call them websites
> You are a poo-emoji bomb-emoji #!! driver
?
https://urlfile.app
[0] - https://github.com/con-dog/snibble/blob/master/README.md
Main issue I encountered was pasting a big payload URL. I had to make a fallback to allow pasting in a dialog if it failed to load from the browser URL bar.
Claudish needs to be cleaned up.
How could I change the image to be less intrusive? I can't have it show an image of the message you're trying to share, because the server never sees that message. But can I make the default image nicer on the eyes.
There's a huge industry around digital signage and I've always felt it could be replaced with a simple Chromium kiosk + auto-refreshed webpage content. There's really no need for expensive HDMI connections or custom video streams when we already have browsers.
That period was a fun time and one I think about all the time. The profit margins and costs have come down so much I don't know if an equivalent workload or company would stay afloat as long.