Show HN: Scroll-It – a Reddit thread auto-scroller for subreddit image threads

Show HN: Scroll-It – a Reddit thread auto-scroller for subreddit image threads(scroll-it.xyz)

2 points by modelorona 1 year ago | 2 comments

Hey there!

I want to tell you about Scroll-It (https://scroll-it.xyz), a little side project I've been working on. I first made it back in 2020 to learn about VueJS and Vuetify, and I've just finished giving it a big update. You can see the source code on github (https://github.com/modelorona/scroll-it)

Scroll-It is a simple gallery auto-scroller that lets you look through Reddit image posts. You can either go through them manually in the gallery view, or you can start a slideshow from any picture.

I recently rewrote the whole thing to work with newer versions of Vue and Vuetify.

The new version does pretty much the same stuff as before, but it should work faster and use your screen space more effectively. It does not have a backend and instead queries the Reddit JSON API directly, parses it, and displays the images.

While working on this, I got help from AI tools like Claude, Codium, and ChatGPT. Claude was usually the most helpful, especially for tricky questions. Codium was good for small tasks but struggled with complex queries.

I've got some ideas for what to add next, like using keyboard shortcuts, server-side rendering, and lazy-loading images.

I'd love to know what you think about Scroll-It! Add a comment below, or feel free to submit an issue directly on the github.

h4l 1 year ago |

I'd be interested in knowing more about your API use. Are you using the official 3rd party API or one of their internal APIs used by their own web front-end?

It's a good idea for a project like this. One bit of feedback is that it would be helpful to have a bit more context for the images - the titles get elipsised on mobile and when viewing a full image you can't see the title.

modelorona 1 year ago | |

hey thanks for your message! I am using the API that's here: https://www.reddit.com/dev/api/

From my understanding, it's used a lot by moderators. It's likely that they may block me since I do not pass any authentication or identifier info, but I don't think it'll happen soon as my use case is extremely simple (knock wood).

I query it as such: https://www.reddit.com/r/earth/top.json?limit=50 and then parse it on the front.

During my testing, I was blocked only once and that was because I ended up querying the same URL too much, which in normal usage shouldn't happen.

The previous iteration used a library called snoowrap (https://github.com/not-an-aardvark/snoowrap) which is unfortunately archived now.

Thank you for the feedback about the image context!