Add support for external links

[sleepyfran]

There are a lot of great communities that center on text too but link to other websites instead of putting the content directly in Reddit, which is currently not supported by Readder.

We could use Mercury Web Parser to add this feature.

[andreasvirkus]

I'd like to tackle this 🙋‍♂

Mercury seems cool! We could maybe also incorporate something like https://devurls.com/, which gets the best of different link aggregators (lobster, HN, etc.)?

How would you want this implemented?

[sleepyfran]

Wow, you're fast! 😁

My initial idea was checking if the post only included a link to somewhere and, in this case, parsing the content of the link with Mercury, but of course if you come across any other usage we can implement it as well!

How do you think including devurls will work here? It looks amazing but I don't think of a use case for it, at least in this specific issue. Feel free to throw new ideas into this though, I'd love to hear them all!

[andreasvirkus]

I was thinking since Mercury exposes content of the link, then we could go through the links from an (or multiple at once) aggregator and get reading time based on the content that Mercury provides? 🤔
HN also has a nice API 🤷‍♂

Edit: I think it makes sense if devurls could be an enhancement added later and this issue should focus on the original scope

[sleepyfran]

Oh, I love that idea @andreasvirkus! We can add devurls and hn as providers and since they're just aggregators we can add an option to the services array that spcecifies whether the provider has sub communities or not and show/hide the sub community input based on that.

Love it! Can you open another issue, so we can discuss it there? 😀

[andreasvirkus]

Sorry, been swamped with various projects at work. Would really like to dive back into this project soon though!

[sleepyfran]

That's completely okay! I haven't been very active in the project lately but I definitely want to come back to it as well. Waiting for the PR whenever you'll be free for it :)