I had the idea for BIGWORDS.PAGE when I wanted to display a message on a tablet that I had remote management control over, but no physical access. Configuring it to be a kiosk browser is easy, but how do I get the browser to show my message? So I made the URL be the message.
It uses a URL fragment to configure the message. Browsers don't send URL fragments to the server, so I never see your message. There's no backend, and no storage.
All parameters are documented, so generating a message link is easy. There's also a built-in editor to make it extra easy.
https://bigwords.page/#Hello,%20HN!&bg=ff6600&fg=000000&font...
There are a few extra features like slides, animations, and countdowns and timers. QR codes too. Not too fancy, but hopefully enough to be useful.
I know the uses for this are pretty niche. But it may be one of those things that you keep as a nugget in your brain, a tool in your back pocket. Not something you use often, but when you do it makes things just a little bit easier.
It's open source (MIT), and self-hostable if that's your thing.
Let me know what you think.
Neat idea!
Fun fact; it's not as widely usable but data URLs work for this too.
Maybe you could add an option to copy the data URL for a page?
e.g. this one
https://bigwords.page/#%23%20Gate%2012%0ABoarding%20now&bg=0...
becomes
data:text/html,<!doctype html><meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"><body style="margin:0;height:100vh;display:flex;flex-direction:column;align-items:center;justify-content:center;background:%230b3d91;color:%23fff;font-family:sans-serif;text-align:center"><h1 style="font-size:18vw;margin:0">Gate 12</h1><p style="font-size:9vw;margin:0">Boarding now</p>
(paste this ^^ into your URL bar)
This is neat. I'm deaf, so I have to write people all the time with big text. I have a mobile app that does this, but it's neat you have something web based. Thanks for this. I'm going to self-host it as I can see a lot of use and I don't want to spam your servers.
Thanks!
The hosted version runs through Cloudflare, and since it’s a static site it caches really well! Don’t ever feel bad about using the hosted version. I’m not worried about bandwidth there. (But self-hosting is fun too!)
We had similar ideas! Except mine is less customizable, I never thought to add formatting.
Same! This solution is way more flexible than mine was.
https://github.com/leoherzog/ParameterPage
https://parameter.page/?title=This%20is%20an%20Example%20Pag...!
I love it!
In fact I employed the same idea for the slide stack site I use for teaching. Not exactly "URL is an app" but "URL is a slide"
https://okaleniuk.codeberg.page/blackboard/_1.html?sequence=...
The same consideration applies. No backend, no storage, also no user data collection, no authorization, no hurdles in general. Everyone can use it.
It's a really cool idea with lots of potential uses, and the extra features are also neat. No notes, well done!
Really nicely done
Great execution.
Curious, did you use AI model?
> The URL is the app
LLM-speak is a huge turn off to me (and a lot of other people here, from my interactions), so the fact that your submission title is AI-generated is... sorry, I have no words. I don’t even care that much about the code, but please write prose by hand, in your own voice, if you want us to read it.
Edit: rephrased the last sentence. Also, here’s my take on the title:
> Show HN: Bigwords.page – turn any screen into a sign, controlled by the URL params
Let me guess, you saw the `–` and thought "Clearly no human uses the em dash. It must all be AI".
I looked over the website and their github page and saw no indication of AI usage. I'm not saying it wasn't used, but unless you have actual evidence, then please point it out.
That’s an en-dash – and I use those myself. (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)
It’s all by the vibes, I don’t have any concrete proof. FWIW, the comment seems at least hand-edited, so maybe it’s just this “the [A] is the [B]” trope that has triggered me. If the rest of it is readable, then I apologize, but still: that’s a bad title, please don’t use this – unless you’re writing a LinkedIn post.
---
Edit: here’s another LLMism example from another HN user: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996255
I always get en and em confused. They are all just dashes to me :-).
The "Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules" is from the docs indicating that these things are not supported.
> I always get en and em confused
Yeah, it’s somewhat a typography-nerdy thing :–) (gosh that looks terrible probably; edit: actually it’s surprisingly fine)
> indicating that these things are not supported
Of course, but it does sound a bit unnatural IMO. Then again, I’m going by the vibes here.
I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names.
En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.
After enough time spent reading LLM speak, I’ve found its phrasing and particularities subconsciously work into the way I write as well, entirely by hand.
It’s not always AI. It could be a human ;) I really despise LLM-written writing too; but I think it’s nice to be not super paranoid about it.
> (I’ve experimented with em-dashes—brefly—but it doesn’t look good to my eye in English.)
I saw what you did there.
For me (not the OP) I see the patterns 'The X is the Y', 'Every X is a Y' (both of which are there) and llm-sense tingles. Add in Not A, B, C or Z and I'm increasingly convinced it's LLM generated text.
OP didn't quote the part with the em dash, they quoted the part with the "The X is the Y", which is a common LLMism.
not that
I think “The URL is the app.” Is AI generated and it weakens the title but that’s ultimately only so important.
You are classifying well and optimizing poorly.
Wait how is "The URL is the app" LLM-speak? Genuine question, sounded fine to me when I read it, not sure what a better way to phrase it would be
It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy. The app is the app, and it lives on the server. The URL just contains the content of the sign.
It's LLM speak because it's wrong, but pithy.
That's all marketing.
it's marketing speech, following the rules of how to make memorable slogans that have been around for decades and in many different formats. Elevator pitches, explain it to me like I'm five, keep it simple, stupid, and so forth. It sounds like an LLM because LLMs learned from the digested wisdom of a million marketers. It may be an LLM produced it or it may just as well be someone who has cracked a marketing textbook some time in their life or hell, has watched the full run of Mad Men and thought, now what is a pithy way to express the selling point of this thing?
on edit: That said, I would probably have said "Turn Any Screen Into A Sign with Just A URL!"
I thought they meant the outputted javascript is embedded in the url, like a bookmarklet. But looking closer, it clearly isn't.
I’ve read it as “the URL is the UI”... sorry; I mean, you can change URL params (remotely) to control the app. It is a good idea perhaps (if you have the means to open a URL remotely), but evidently the title does not get the idea across. (Maybe I’m also wrong, I haven’t read the docs yet :)
“The [A] is the [B]” (and variations with “the” replaced with “your”) is screaming LLM to me. It’s been used by real people too, but it sounds very corporate, and is not something I’ve seen used to describe a personal project before LLMs.
It must have been used by humans before LLMs, because where do you think they learned it?
The training data set is a huge corpus of text from a wide variety of styles and time period. A human writer knows to adjust their writing style to fit their intended audience. A skilled LLM user knows to direct the LLM to generate in the appropriate style. A naive LLM user doesn't, so that's how we get this uncanny valley ick, where the text feels wrong.
It was always corny except in very specific cases.
The network is the computer
All the marketing materials that got used for training. Marketing speak is not my cup of team.
It has been used before LLMs. I have no idea why LLMs prefer it, though.
LLM apophenia is so widespread in HN that it's becoming quite sickening.
This is like asking "how do you know a cat is a cat and not a dog?". If you've seen enough samples, you recognise the pattern.
Yeah, the issue here is that the URL is not the app.
This is basically a differently-shaped https://github.com/antonmedv/textarea
Cool idea, but agree that fixing actual mistakes in the title is a worthwhile use of time.
Donald Knuth once said "Jon Bentley probably hit the nail on the head when he once was asked why literate programming hasn’t taken the whole world by storm. He observed that a small percentage of the world’s population is good at programming, and a small percentage is good at writing; apparently I am asking everybody to be in both subsets."
Get off your high horse. Not everybody studied to write prose, not everybody was born American to begin with. If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good. That's probably the best usage for them anyway.
> If LLMs helps programmers get heard - good
It does not, it does the opposite. It gets the programmer ignored.
Comments like "don't say this, this is LLM-ism" are the things that help the programmer get heard, whether she isn't good at English or she was just lazy and used LLM to generate text.
I haven’t studied to write prose either. I have studied English since when I was a kid, but I still make mistakes sometimes, and that’s okay.
LLMs turn your own voice into uniform corpo-speak. It is usually not an improvement, and it certainly doesn’t help you get heard – you’ll blend in with hundreds of other projects with the same-looking landing page, same tone of voice, same kilometres of docs that nobody read before putting up, and you’re basically playing a game of chance here. It’s like TikTok for programmers.
Ten times out of ten, I’ll prefer broken English over Claudish. Speak in your own voice. Don’t be afraid.
Indeed. I would much prefer to read someone's poor English over their fluent LLM.
it doesn't help programmers be heard, it helps LLMs be heard. Just publish the thing with your own words, what matters is if they are genuine, not that they sound exactly like everybody else.
Tip: you can install this as a PWA (progress web app) onto your mobile device home screen. (If you have recent iOS 26+ or Android.)
If the site adds a PWA manifest, Android (Chrome/Google app) will show a prompt to install as app on load. Also PWA install will be available for older iOS.
I made a simple tool that generates a minimal PWA manifest: https://logo.leftium.com/logo
https://bigwords.page/#smol!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!%20!...!
You seem to have the same bug I had when I first implemented https://screaming.saej.in/
In Firefox, scrollWidth includes spaces that extend into the margin, so it's possible for text to fit perfectly on the screen, but scrollWidth > clientWidth. Fix here https://saej.in/posts/screaming/
Thanks! Like a dummy, I never tested in anything but my own browser. I found a couple of other bugs as well that weren't obvious without Firefox.
Who remembers https://bigassmessage.com/
epilepsy warning for the 'MAGIC' style :(
Can epileptics drive to a movie theater and watch a movie?
That's an interesting question. What motivated it?
In the UK it depends, some epileptics aren't allowed to drive. Not all epileptics are photosensitive and not all movies trip people.
epileptics typically aren’t allowed to drive if there’s any risk of having a seizure while driving (depends on the type and severity of the epilepsy)
Hook it up to voice control so I can put an iPad in the back window of the car and tell other drivers… things.
I had this idea ten years ago. Told my parents it’d be nice to say “have a good day” and my moms initial reaction was she’d say “** you”. End of that idea.
Ouch, life long child trauma created. No idea is good enough to impress mum.
i think it was the message she would put on the screen, not her reaction to childs invention
Won't it say
> You are a poo-emoji bomb-emoji #!! driver
?
I am exercising my Fifth Amendment right to silence at this time.
I considered something similar with LED lights but I deemed it illegal in Germany
I thought of something similar to both. A display would be nice but car to car/peer to peer communication would work too. It'd be a nightmare though considering I know how depraved the internet is. It's not anywhere near as anonymous but I don't think people generally care as much as they probably should.
This sort of incredibly simple, crisp idea is what changes the world. Great job!
Completely different architecture, but would be amazing if another device could control what message (or photo, embedded video) is displayed.
There's a huge industry around digital signage and I've always felt it could be replaced with a simple Chromium kiosk + auto-refreshed webpage content. There's really no need for expensive HDMI connections or custom video streams when we already have browsers.
I worked for a company creating apps for Kiosks that used SiteKiosk. It was a tight sandbox around Internet Explorer on Windows. This was 2014. Browsers are highly viable but properly locked kiosk mode wasn't. We used custom enclosures for $$$ with micro ATX Intel. Now Raspberry Pi or smaller could run circles around those workloads.
That period was a fun time and one I think about all the time. The profit margins and costs have come down so much I don't know if an equivalent workload or company would stay afloat as long.
I'm working on TheOpenPresenter for this, do give it a try. You can pretty much open the landing page, scan the QR code and you're set. It's also open-source and pretty mature now.
Cool project and nicely done but "the URL is the app" is just meaningless and it sounds exactly like what an llm would drop in every other paragraph.
because this is exactly what happened
> No account, no app, nothing stored on a server.
> No app. No login. Just a URL.
> No app, no account, free.
these two are from the front page
I did something similar years ago but for live satellite imagery https://earth.wooleys.us. I wanted to show my kids hurricane/typhoon imagery live. Worked great to throw up on a chromecast and let it run.
"Nothing else: no lists, tables, links, quotes, images or rules."
Claudish needs to be cleaned up.
where did you find this? has this been removed?
This reminds me of at a previous job people would leave their laptops unlocked. Security threatened people with yubikeys. So I used that opportunity to create https://butts.netlify.app so that any time someone left their laptop unlocked I’d go there and they’d be met with the word butts.
The URL is the state but clearly there is an actual app here
You right. But I only had 80 characters to work with.
In the make one by hand section, you probably don't need to tell people %20 is a space. If they type it in naturally, the browser should encode automatically
Good call. Removed it.
I love solutions like this. Make the URL the entirety of the data needed. Awesome
I did a similar thing to share files via a URL :)
Any learnings from pushing the envelope on URL payloads? Years ago I prototyped a customizable Powers of Ten-ish zoomer, with the stack of images/videos/maps/molecules specified in the URL. I should reprise it at some point if no one else does - wondering if you encountered anything unexpected, or Just Worked?
Very cool. Could you add base64 encoding to the query part so that it doesn’t hint at what the screen will say from the link text. Kind of gives the joke away sometimes.
I use a similar thing but designed to be as few steps as possible:
1. this is great!
2. QR code support? %QR=256x256&QR_ECC=min etc.?
3. prolly other natural / ez "make it big" - base64 tho not all browsers will support long enough URL to be worth it
The QR code support is documented here: https://bigwords.page/docs#qr-code
It’s “EZ” in that you don’t control the parameters of how the QR gets created. You can just control where it gets shown, and what it links to (though it does support telephone, SMS, Wi-Fi, email, and location).
Neat! For mobile, it would be nice to have an on-screen button to toggle full screen and turn the page landscape.
Cool project. But why not built with php so I can simply throw it on my running web server?
It's a static site.
Damn, you triggered my old memories of clicking one of these on some old forum: https://disco.[EPILEPSY WARNING]fleo.se/hello
A brilliant example of zero-install, URL-driven utility design. Keeping the interface footprint minimal maximizes accessibility across diverse endpoints.
I like that the fragment is basically argv for a static web app.
I use to try and coordinate game nights across the world, and a url with the Unix timestamp of the event and a countdown showing how many days and hours worked quite well.
I used to order drinks like this when the bar was full
Suggestion: make it a GoogleTV / AppleTV app so users can set it up in a few clicks and transform any screen laying around into a sign.
Shameless plug: I made Theopenpresenter.com that can do this. You can find the app in GoogleTV (not AppleTV due to browser limitation). And you can control it from phone or anywhere else.
I built https://signagesync.app for my cafe. It can be used to create a video wall (combine multiple screens to make a bigger screen).
I think BIGWORDS.PAGE would be a great companion to a web browser app on those TV devices. I haven't found any good web browser for AppleTV, but if somebody has a browser/kiosk app that let's you send a URL from your phone, that would be really great!
Unfortunately Apple TV doesn't support WebView. I'm procuring a second-hand device so I can test my app there. I'm thinking of rendering it on the server and sending a series of images. Not sure of the cost, though.
Brilliant
Nice feature-set, cool project.
I like this site because it exemplifies DOTADIW, do one thing and do it well.
how to hide or change the gigantic preview when sharing on apple messages? id prefer to change it, the default is obtrusive
IIRC with any link thru Messages, before sending, you can press and hold it and it'll give u the option to send just as a text link
Love this and I already have a use for this
how to hide the Preview when sharing on messages? id prefer something more neutral.
That's the OG (Open Graph) Image. It's an image built into the site that's used as the thumbnail for shares on social media and messaging apps. (More info on OG Images here: https://layerre.com/glossary/open-graph-image/)
How could I change the image to be less intrusive? I can't have it show an image of the message you're trying to share, because the server never sees that message. But can I make the default image nicer on the eyes.
Make the default og.png calm and generic, just the wordmark on a plain background, so the preview reads as "here's a sign link" rather than a big ad.
Nice work! This is great.
Really well done, can think of a few times this would have been useful in the recent past. Would be great for conferences in particular!
Really clever! Definitely feels like positive hacker creativity. Thanks for making it open source.
this is actually awesome, i've had something similar on my todo list forever. thanks!!! https://bigwords.page/#%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F
Love this. Simple idea. Nice execution.
This is a new project and a great place to start.
So many fun rabbit holes from here with the different ways to get this working (and keeping displaying) on a chromecast, etc.
Site is blocked - getting an SSL warning on Firefox.
I've used something like this on a phone to tell another car something was wrong with their vehicle.
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> The URL is the app
We used to call them websites