microlink newsletter #1: Prerendering, Pricing & SDK first steps
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Prerendering by default
When you access into a web, normally you need to wait a few milliseconds after all the content is available: Your browser is prerendering all the content before you can interact with it.
We use this technique in order to be sure the data we can extract is loaded, using prerender parameter.
If you wanted to apply this behavior, you had to explicitly do it. This decision was driven because prerender makes response time slow and, in order to guarantee the minimum response time, we disable it by default.
But now it will be enabled by default in all requests 🙌.
You don’t want to worry about if the target web needs or not prerendering. You do not have to know!
We have made great improvements in infrastructure and now the response time is constant even with prerendering enabled, so we decided to enable it by default unless you explicitly deactivate it.
Adaptative Professional Plans
Our pricing now reflects different configurations based on your necessities.
The authentication way for professional plans was updated as well.
The free plan is limited to a maximum of 500 requests per day, with one concurrent request per second.
Metascraper v3
We released a lot of open source under our microlink on GitHub.
We are a company that believes in Open Source Sustainability and we want to achieve a symbiosis between collaborative code and infrastructure service.
One of our core projects is metascraper that it converts regular HTML into structured data.
We worked together with Ian Storm Taylor, the original metascraper’s author for commit our improvements and make it accessible to everyone.
The first plugins we created were for Amazon and SoundCloud.
The plugins have an inmediate effect over microlink API.
More plugins will come in the next months, like LinkedIn, Facebook, Airbnb, AngelList, … feel free to suggest us!
Microlink.js
Although the API is the main way to consume the data, we know that it is only a first step to make it accessible to any website.
We are creating microlinkjs, a set of front end libraries for consuming the API data easily, with a fancy card preview.
It makes it easy integrate microlink.io with your website, no matters what is your frontend stack, converting your links automagically into beautiful previews.
Currently, we have Vanilla and React bundles ready, but more are coming: VueJS, WordPress, Angular, Polymer,…
Thanks a lot to Brad Adams and Jon Rojí for pushing around the project, it would have been impossible without you 🙌.
Again, feel free to suggest the bundle that you need.
PS: We have an open chat, come to chat with us!
