Product brief #2:
new brand, unified docs, instant API credentials

Microlink has a new brand, designed by Silvia Calavera, and the website now follows it. This brief also covers a single home for all the documentation, the metascraper work on video, and a more responsive Microlink SDK.

When the project started, the time went into a small API that worked efficiently, and nobody stopped to design a brand for microlink.io. The design was a debt we knew we would pay later. Silvia's logo and the rebuilt website pay it.

We also used the redesign to fix the payment process. You now receive your API credentials immediately after payment, handled by a dedicated payments microservice.

As announced in newsletter #1, we started shipping a set of front end libraries that make the Microlink API as easy to consume as possible. Next to them, we want examples and integrations for popular frameworks such as WordPress and Jekyll.

Maintaining documentation for several libraries is laborious, so we combined all the documentation for microlink.io into one place. After comparing multiple approaches and how other companies handle it, we based the portal on the Vercel documentation.

The migration took laborious work, and /docs is now the only place to check the API and SDK documentation. We are grateful to Vercel for making it possible.

metascraper is our metadata extractor, and it gets improvements every week. The current target is data accuracy for video content.

This period brought internal improvements and a new package, metascraper-youtube, which improves the results when the target is a YouTube URL.

We are also testing a new video property for the Microlink API (spoiler). It returns any video detected in the target URL, which lets the Microlink SDK build a richer content preview. Results will be in a following newsletter.

The Microlink SDK repository reached 100 stars on GitHub.

Extra effort went into how the SDK cards respond to different viewports, to be sure every preview renders properly at each size. A new demo on microlink.io shows what you can build with the SDK.

With the unified documentation, the SDK docs also gained more examples and the API parameters you can use to customize your previews. To try them, open the demo on microlink.io, then copy an example from the SDK section of /docs into your own page.