Show HN: Simple Web service for fetching HTML page title (opens in new tab)

Givan, yes and no. Clearly, you're right in that it's one more thing to learn (a particular variant of REST API). But, there can be many benefits of using a Web service like this (or, another app/service/abstraction layer, etc.) in some situations. For example, suppose that you want to get the meta description of a certain Web page using a Javascript (from your own HTML page). The Web page may happen to be large and there can substantial network latency, etc. In many cases, you do not want to do it on the fly every time your page is loaded. You may want to implement a storage or caching layer on the server side, etc. PageSynopsis provides such service "out of the box". It also supports "asynchronous" fetching, periodic refreshing, and so forth. This is a very simple service, but I use it from different apps of mine (and, I don't have to replicate this functionality across different apps). Thanks for checking it out.

Parsing HTML with a RegEx pattern is considered very bad practice, there are other more robust ways of scraping. For example, in Python, BeautifulSoup.

You do have a fair point though, this functionality does exist in most major programming languages.

Are you telling me you wouldn't use a JSON api for sending HTTP requests and parsing the results as JSON?

It's working fine for me on Chrome 20 dev on OS X.

BTW: Use the reply links under comments. :)

D*ng, LiquidSummer. I've been using this service for almost a year with no problem, and you broke it. :)

It appears that, because it recursively calls it, the call eventually times out. (Google App Engine has this time limit of 10~30 seconds.) I'm not sure if I'll have a solution for this, but I can at least catch the exception. I'll need to look into it further.

Thanks for finding this bug!