Do you know which mybinder.org link to use to share a binder?

Binder
1

I want to share my binder with someone, which link should I send them by email/twitter/etc?

It turns out there are many different links you could share and none of them are obviously broken when you first try them. However only one of them is what you really want to share.

What are the options?

Only the first one is “the right one”. The second and third one will probably work. The last one will appear to work when the sharer tries it, but won’t work for anyone else.

I think for anyone but a Binder expert it is not at all clear which of these is the right one. They all look big and complicated with stuff in them that makes a limited amount of sense.

The question is: how can we change the UI so that a very large fraction of users pick the right link to share because it is the link they get when they do the obvious thing to get the link to share.

This raises the question: what is the obvious way of getting the sharable link?

  • copy link from address-bar
  • copy link from a sharing widget
  • construct link by hand
  • use a “share this on X” button
  • other

0 voters

Once we have a bit of data and feedback (please do post it as replies) maybe we can start figuring out how to change the user experience so that “the obvious thing” for more users leads them to gettinnng the one true link for sharing.

3 Likes
2

By “widget” do you mean in the sense of a Jupyter Notebook widget? Another thought that occurred to me is that this might be something worth user testing. Maybe we can build out some prototypes and ask folks what is most intuitive to them?

3

Was thinking of something like the button here in discourse but on the loading page you see while you binder is spinning up:

47
Screen Shot 2019-06-11 at 18.47.47.png1550×510 70.3 KB

4

https://gke.mybinder.org/

To me this seems like the obvious and correct way. I must not really understand your choices.

1 Like
5

I too find the ‘gke.mybinder.org’ and ‘ovh.mybinder.org’ being exposed to users confusing, since they aren’t guaranteed to work. Users will copy paste them around, and it will work for the most part until they don’t… IMO providing a graphic is a much better way of crediting where the cluster is than DNS…

6

That is exactly my point, we could explain why you should not link directly to a cluster but the fact that it needs explaining is a bug.

Out of interest, what makes the cluster specific link the right one for you?

7

I think we should reconsider this and what we’ve learnt since deciding this last time. Probably warrants its own thread as the problem of what link to share gets simpler if we reduce the choice but doesn’t go away (people have always shared the direct-to-the-hub link which we should try and fix)

8

In the Binder Federation, does each cluster maintain its own Docker image hub?

If folk are demoing a thing via MyBinder, and the build is a complex one that takes a significant time to build, they’ll want to know that their image has been prebuilt when they go to launch the demo. If they know it’s built on one cluster, how could they improve their chances of the launching their (assumed to be prebuilt) Binderised repo on that cluster when it comes to demo time?

9

I just entered mybinder.org in chrome and the “cluster-specific” URL appeared.:grinning:

1 Like
10

What would be really sweet would be to be able to create a badge that knows its own URL and branch. Then when somebody forks your repo or you switch to a branch, it would still “just work”.
:crazy_face:

1 Like