I love my fiancée. I love my family. I love my friends. I do not love spending 40 seconds wrestling pop-ups just to watch the 12-second video they DM’d me. TikTok’s mobile web experience feels like it was engineered by the same demons that invent airport Wi-Fi logins: endless “Open in App!” nags, muted audio, and a layout that looks like it lost a bar fight with CSS.
Two years ago I hacked around it with Peektok, a scrappy Android app that hijacked any tiktok.com link and played the video instantly. It worked great—until I defected to iPhone land, where building a native app requires a Mac I don’t own (and a personal loan for the Apple Developer fee).
15-Minute Makeover
Enter LinkTok: a dead-simple web version that does the same trick from any browser. I gave ChatGPT a five-word brief—“build Peektok, but web”—and fourteen minutes later I had:
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A snappy name (thanks, AI branding department).
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A Node.js backend ready for Cloud Run.
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An HTML/CSS front end tossed onto my dusty cPanel like it’s 2009.
The only hiccup was a Google CLI config mix-up—one quick curse word, one gcloud config set project linktok, and we were live. The entire build clocked in shorter than making my morning coffee (and definitely shorter than writing this post).
How It Works
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Paste any TikTok link at jbigs.com/linktok.
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Hit Go.
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Enjoy “TikTok without the hassle” in glorious full-screen, unmuted, zero pop-ups.
Photo carousels? Nah. Scraping that mess is a rabbit hole I’m not crawling into—life’s too short and my caffeine budget is finite.
Why Bother?
Because friction kills fun. I refuse to download TikTok and surrender my remaining free time, but I still want to laugh at the latest cat-in-a-tutu content my fiancée thinks is “so us.” LinkTok trims the fat, serves the video, and lets me get back to being a semi-productive adult.
What’s Next?
Kick the tires, share it with your similarly TikTok-averse friends, and let me know if it breaks.
Meanwhile, I’m cooking up a mega post on my new HubSpot plugin, Fondsworth, where I took the biggest problem I faced in my career working in Sales/Marketing and fixed it. Stay tuned.
Fuck TikTok pop-ups. Long live LinkTok.