Show HN: Plain Text Cryptocurrency Prices

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	Show HN: Plain Text Cryptocurrency Prices (plaintextco.in)
	63 points by guillaumec 1467 days ago

17 comments

tiborsaas 1466 days ago

I get randomly HTML and ASCII in the terminal, otherwise cool product.

It would be nice to configure a list of coins to be displayed. Something like:

    https://plaintextco.in/collection/btc+tezos+near

Also, you could reduce the HTML size significantly by using <i> instead of <span> and create a classnames for the colors.

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guillaumec 1466 days ago

Yes, since I got too many requests from HN, I had to enable the CDN. I didn't realize it would cache both html and terminal request together. I tried setting "Vary: User-Agent" but it didn't work. You can add: "?term=true" to make it work in terminal for now.

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weird-eye-issue 1466 days ago

I think Vary: Accept-Encoding or similar is the solution for this but not sure

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alainchabat 1466 days ago

looks like OP implemented it ( https://plaintextco.in/about ) :

   https://plaintextco.in/?ids=bitcoin,ethereum,mina-protocol,avalanche-2

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tiborsaas 1466 days ago

oh cool, it's now ready for bookmarking :)

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danuker 1467 days ago

This is awesome! I will be able to check the prices without spinning up my old laptop's fan.

My preference for time is much longer-term. Trading too often can lead to ruin due to transaction fees (and/or emotion).

I'd use the 1 day, 30 day, and 365 day price changes instead of 1h, 24h, 7d.

Another small issue: I can't use autoscroll in Firefox because the whole page width is a link.

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lazyvar 1467 days ago

Some small feedback if I may: Could you separate the link and the text on the main page? My first thought was: "This isn't text. I can't highlight or copy anything. It's actually the opposite of what the title says." But everything was as advertised when viewing an actual coin.

Cool site! Cheers!

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

You are probably right. I should also probably add a link to a 'true' plain text version that returns a pure txt.

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memorable 1467 days ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20220614131126/https://plaintext...

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olalonde 1467 days ago

Pretty cool, I noticed it works both in the browser and command line. I suppose you are using the User-Agent header to detect which version to serve? Which library did you use for the interface?

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

It's all done by hand in go. Yes it uses the user agent to guess if the request comes from a terminal.

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bluetidepro 1467 days ago

HN hug of death, I assume.

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matthewcford 1467 days ago

I assumed the prices were 0, hence the empty webpage.

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jokestir 1467 days ago

That's awesome.

Some things that can be improved:

- The UI is left justified on my mobile browser. It will look better if it is centered.

- The font is too small. Perhaps you could increase font size so users don't have to zoom in.

Also, did you a framework to generate plaintext front-end or is it hand crafted?

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

Thanks for the comment! I wanted to keep the html and css as simple as possible so I didn't put much layout. If it gets traction I will improve that. Same thing for the font.

It's all hand crafted. My first time using golang so the code is probably not as efficient as it could be.

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1337shadow 1467 days ago

Really? It even renders ascii and colors properly in a terminal with curl !!!

\xe2\x94\x82\n\xe2\x94\x94\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x80\xe2\x94\x98\n

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KyleBerezin 1467 days ago

Firefox 101.0.1 on Windows didn't seem to render it correctly. I was going to compare it to chrome but then the server died. Very cool page though.

Update: the server is back up and it looks fine on Firefox now. false alarm

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rabuse 1467 days ago

All I see is a white page.

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memorable 1467 days ago

Same here. Hug of death.

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weird-eye-issue 1467 days ago

Is this white page some sort of satire or is it down?

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memorable 1467 days ago

It's down ATM. I found a Wayback Machine snapshot for proof.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220614131126/https://plaintext...

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paulnpace 1467 days ago

Interesting. I wasn't aware that you could use a Cloudflare IP address along with a different name server.

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lxgr 1467 days ago

Maybe they're using something like an ALIAS record instead of a CNAME setup?

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captn3m0 1467 days ago

Cloudflare Worker perhaps

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rkagerer 1466 days ago

Oh. From the headline I was hoping for something easily parseable.

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giantrobot 1467 days ago

I got a blank page...did crypto prices drop that much today?

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julianeon 1467 days ago

This is really nice. Great work.

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sodality2 1467 days ago

Getting a 504 :(

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Retr0id 1467 days ago

An intriguing failure mode (response body seems truncated)

  $ curl -i https://plaintextco.in/
  HTTP/2 504 
  date: Tue, 14 Jun 2022 14:13:44 GMT
  [more headers]
  cf-ray: 71b3ab17fc7254d5-MAN
  
        <!DOCTYPE htm

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

I think the server code has a concurrent access bug that makes it crash in the middle of a request. Unfortunately due to the current charge I can't even restart it at the moment.

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

Back online for now... please be gentle ;)

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rapiz 1467 days ago

Got this just now (2022-06-14T22:36:26+08:00)

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

Yeah the server is not handling the load at the moment... I am trying to restart it.

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KyleBerezin 1467 days ago

The curse of Hacker News attention

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

Well, I should have tested a bit more before posting.

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nominusllc 1467 days ago

Is the source posted somewhere? Maybe we can help

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

Not at the moment, this was a week end project, and the code is quite horrible. But yes I should probably put it online and get advise.

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j_leboulanger 1467 days ago

Here is an extract of what happens in terminal :

curl https://plaintextco.in/coins/bitcoin

<!DOCTYPE html> <title></title> <meta name="description" content="Plain text cryptocurrency prices"> <style> @font-face { font-family: 'dejavu-sans-mono'; src: url('/static/DejaVuSansMono.ttf') format('truetype'); } * { font-family: 'dejavu-sans-mono'; font-size: small; line-height: 120%; } </style>

<h1>plaintextco.in</h1>

<pre> Bitcoin (BTC)

     <span style="color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #fe971a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #fe971a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #fc961a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #fc961a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #fd971a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #ff971a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f7931a;"></span>      Price                    $22,183
  <span style="color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f7931a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #fd971a;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f7931a;background-color: #ff9a1b;"></span><span style="color: #f79319;background-color: #fa941a;"></span><span style="color: #f79217;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f79116;background-color: #f7931a;"></span><span style="color: #f9a239;background-color: #f79116;"></span><span style="color: #f9a53f;ba

It's impossible to read :(

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jasonjayr 1467 days ago

Elinks in a terminal with 256 color + utf-8 renders it pretty decently.

https://imgur.com/a/NPsN5N5

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guillaumec 1467 days ago

Actually it also supports a black and white mode using only utf8 characters. I haven't exposed it yet though.

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paulnpace 1467 days ago

Lynx looks great.

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