~mlb/linkhut#17: 
Adding a link without a title

Pocket has the advantage of the browser addon being just a one click save. For linkhut the Firefox addon doesn't work so I can't judge that, but adding a link manually requires a title. That's quite a bit of friction, because I don't necessarily want to pause and think about a relevant title - in Pocket I just save a link and later come back to tag it. I'm not saying this has to change, because it hinders the social part, where the links show up on the feed. Maybe the title could be automatically fetched from the pasted URL? Anyways, fingers crossed this product grows because it could become THE data hoarder tool :)

Status
RESOLVED WONT_FIX
Submitter
~mronetwo
Assigned to
No-one
Submitted
7 months ago
Updated
7 months ago
Labels
third-party-tools

~mlb 7 months ago

Thanks for bringing up this issue.

Regarding Firefox addon

If we're talking about the Linkhut Companion, it "works quite well on my machine" ©. One thing to note however is that you must configure it by providing a Personal Access Token.

  • You can generate an access token for your account going to https://ln.ht/_/oauth and clicking on "Generate new token"
  • To configure the add-on to use the token, go to 'about:addons' -> 'Linkhut Companion' -> 'Preferences' -> and copy the Personal Access Token into the relevant field (also verify that the other fields have the right values, notably: 'https://ln.ht/' for Web URL and 'https://api.ln.ht/' for API URL)

Alternatively, under Misc in the settings page, there's a bookmarklet you can use that pre-populates the submission form with the title of the current page. This might still be a higher friction path than Pocket due to redirecting to the link submission form but it works relatively well in most cases.

Regarding making titles not mandatory

I do worry that making titles optional might lead to having a lot of bookmarks being just plain URLs (tags and descriptions being optional already), and then linkhut might not be as useful as a discovery and information retrieval platform. I feel that making data entry seamless is the responsibility of the tooling, such as the aforementioned firefox add-on and bookmarklet, and forcing clients to specify a title will ensure said tooling to take this into consideration as part of their CX. But I'm open to listen counter arguments.

~mronetwo 7 months ago

Yes, I'm talking about the Companion. I did paste in the Token but I'm getting the Error getting link: NetErr error.

Oh, the Post to linkhut seems really nice, and seems to just address my issue.

Yes, I understand your reasoning for the title and I do see your point in making the tooling take care of that. Assuming the Companion works well and the post to linkhut works (I tried it and it does fill in the title), this is not an issue. I'm totally with you that without title, discovery would suffer a lot.

~mlb 7 months ago

Sounds like a permissions issue... Could you check that you have 'Access your data for *://api.ln.ht' enabled under the Permissions tab of the extension? ('about:addons' -> 'Linkhut Companion' -> 'Permissions').

~mronetwo 7 months ago

Yep, that worked. The issue was Permissions. I don't know how unique my situation is, but maybe it should be mentioned somewhere, so others don't stumble on that issue?

~mlb REPORTED WONT_FIX 7 months ago

Agreed, I have asked ~pyrho, the maintainer of the extension, to provide installation instructions that go over this.

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