Micro-info

Testing an old BBC iplayer embedding trick

2008-09-11T12:18:00.001+01:00

Does this still work as a trick for embedding iplayer content that isn't supposed to be embeddable? (Hacking the iPlayer embedded media player)

Gaming the World

2006-03-15T11:02:00.000Z

So Google have bought SketchUp, a 3D CAD/drawing pages that works with Google Earth.

Seems like the basis for a wealth of educational/simulation games to me...

I wonder when the Sims will be roaming Google Earth's streets?

Search across computers

2006-02-09T10:54:00.000Z

Google's starting to scare me...

For example, their new desktop client has this service
(http://desktop.google.com/features.html#searchremote)

>Search Across Computers New!
>
>To search documents and web history from your other computers, enter your
>Google Account information. An error message on the Desktop homepage will
>let you know if you accidently entered an incorrect username or password.
>(see more details about Search Across Computers)
>You can also choose to:
>
> * Name this computer: This name will be displayed in the search
>results of your other computers that have enabled Search Across Computers
>with the same Google Account.
> * My other computers can search this computer's:
> o Documents and web history
> o Documents only
> o Web history only
> * Clear my files from Google: In order to share your indexed files
>between your computers, we first copy this content to Google Desktop
>servers located at Google. This is necessary, for example, if one of your
>computers is turned off or otherwise offline when new or updated items
>are indexed on another of your machines. We store this data temporarily
>on Google Desktop servers and automatically delete older flies, and your
>data is never accessible by anyone doing a Google search. You can learn
>more by reading the Google Desktop privacy policy.
>
> While your data is automatically deleted from our servers, you can
>use the Clear my Files from Google button to manually remove all your
>files from Google Desktop servers. Note that if these files havent yet
>been copied to your other computers, clicking this button will prevent
>you from finding them when you search from your other computers. The
>files will, of course, still be searchable from their computer of origin.

This is all starting to look a bit like 'Google wants to organize the
world's information *by having a copy of it all*'! (as sort of predicted
here: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076)

Neat Blogging Extension for Firefox: Performancing

2006-01-03T21:54:00.000Z

Yet another of those really short posts to try out a new blogposting extension for Firefox called Performancing.

In operation, it adds this sort of panel:

/>to the lower half of a Firefox window.
.
You can set up the extension (very easily indeed) to access a Blogger account, as well as several other major blogging engines.

Choosing which blog to post to is simply a matter of selecting the appropriate blog from the list of blogs you have told the extension about.

The text editing panel offers a basic set of formatting tools, and a spell checker addition is also under testing.

So here goes - will this be published as easy as anything...? ;-)

Tooltip Links

2005-12-05T16:08:00.000Z

Earlier today, I read this post on Linking to stuff in your posts which describes a situation familiar to many bloggers and blog readers:

Sometimes when I write a blog post I’d like to refer to a list of links but I can only hyperlink under one word, so what most people do is this:

eg. A lot of people have talked about this, and I have mentioned it here, and, here…

I think this is a bit awkward, the proper way is to list all the titles of the posts, but sometimes you can’t just do that in the middle of a post, it may ruin the flow.

So what if (I think I may rename this blog what if…) you could choose the word to put a link under and then when someone clicks on that link an ajax box pops-up listing all the title’s of the links.

Like this perhaps:

and demoed here?

Chat Mail

2005-11-13T22:48:00.000Z

Every four or five months I clear out my email Mailbox, vowing as I do so that I will put some of the recommendations made in Mark Hurst's Managing Incoming Email management report and not let things get so bad ever again. (My email count last week was about 1600 messages, down to 18 today.)

Here are some nuggets:

The correct way to measure e-mail load is by the message count, or the number of e-mails currently sitting in the inbox. While message volume shows how much more e-mail users have to manage than yesterday, message count shows the total number of e-mails that are currently loading the user. A user who gets 100 messages a day may not be overloaded at all, if their message count is low; conversely, a user who gets ten e-mails a day may indeed be overloaded.

From this, the key recommendation to managing email follows straightforwardly:

Keep the inbox empty. In other words, clear out incoming e-mails before they pile up too high in the inbox. Delete most of them, file some of them (in mail folders or elsewhere), but most importantly, get them all out of the inbox before they really begin to pile up. Keep the inbox empty.

One thing I know from my own bitter experience is that I use all sorts of reasons to justify why I keep my Mailbox cluttered. These are succintly summarised in a section on The Misused Mailbox:

People often use the inbox for several purposes it was never intended for:
To-do list. Users often keep action items and other “to-dos” in the inbox. This is perhaps the most common misuse.

Filing system. Meeting notes, project status messages, attachments containing proposals and other important documents stay in the inbox, instead of going to a proper project folder.

Calendar. Dates and times for meetings, conference calls, or other events pile up in the inbox.

Bookmarks list. E-mails are kept that contain pointers to websites and other applications. Usernames and passwords may be in these messages as well.

Address book. Messages containing phone numbers and postal addresses of contacts may stay in the inbox instead of being entered into an actual address book.

There is another reason I'm aware of that contributes to my email overload, and that's not always deleting messages I reply to, or deleting throwaway messages I have sent. (You know the sort of thing - one liners saying 'thanks for that', or 'coffee?' - things that should be consigned to instant messaging - only I don't use IM, and neither do a lot fo people I know).

So this is where chat mail comes in. Chat mail is mail that is purely throwaway and conversational. To handle chat mail I would like a couple of new buttons in my email (Gmail?) client:

1) 'Reply and Delete' - if I take this option, I generate a reply to the current message, and when I send that reply the message I am replying to gets deleted.

2) 'Send and Delete' - when I take this option, send the current message and then delete it from my mailbox.

cc:Blog

2005-11-13T21:28:00.000Z

I've already mentioned Suprglu in a couple of posts (here and here, in fact), but it also came to mind when I recently revisited this exchange across the Library Clips and Data Mining blogs on managing conversations across blogs.

One of the key problems I think is that each blog post should be able to stand as a post in its own right, yet also contribute to a conversation ionvolving one or more other blogs. [In case this ramble needs to refer back to this, let's say each blog post can act as a freestanding conversational node.]

The cross-referral between blog posts/conversational nodes can be managed through formal Trackbacks, or informally through comments ("I blogged about something similar *here*"...).

But are there any other ways? I've been thinking about email a lot, lately (and hope to post something exciting(?!) on this topic on my other blog in the next couple of days) and wondered whether a cc: convention would work...

CC:? Hmm...how exactly? Well, consider Suprglu - it aggregates posts from a variety of feeds in date order to produce a derivative blog. Now, if we want to be able to read through a 'blogversation' , it's a pain following Trackback links. The Library Clips suggestion of a Conversation Exchange provides for a centralised collection of pings relating to a particular conversation, and I suppose (though I don't think it's mentioned) that this list could then provide a river of posts in a single feed reader.

My take is very similar to this, though it tries to develop a different metaphor. How about if we send a copy of our blog post to a derivative blog? (I know the scope for spam is horrendous...) That is, when I make a post in part as a contribution to a conversation, I cc: a copy of the post to the blog posts I am conversing with...or more likely, I cc: a copy of my post to a derivative blog where all the posts in the conversation can be viewed in one place.

To get the original post at the start of the derivative blog, the original author would add a cc:Blog link that, when it is polled the first time, creates a new derived blog, sends a copy of the post to a new derived blog as the first entry, and returns a unique ID for that conversation. The erson cc:Blogging the post then sends a copy of their post to the derivative blog.

The cc:Blog link on this second post, if polled, will return the ID of the derivative blog/conversation the post is contributing to...

To view the whole conversation, a reader simply has to visit the derived blog page.

Hmmm - much easier probably to set up a Coversation Exchange and provide an easy way for people access the OPML feed and read all the posts in a conversation in a single page...

DEL.ICIO.US TAGS: blogging cc:Blog

Rollyo Portable? PageLinks Search

2005-11-10T12:38:00.000Z

Just after I made the SearchLinks post last night, it struck me that another possibly useful tool would be a federated search over all the sites linked to from a given page: Rollyo Portable, if you like (after the Rollyo services which allosws you to create personalised, aggregated searches via Yahoo).

How would this work? Quite straightforwardly, I imagine:

It would use toolbar searchbox, or text field added to the page somehow, and
a server-side script, to
search a page for anchor (<a>) tags, then
extract the href link information (domains and directory path information),
and use them in multiple calls to Google, say, using the Google Search API and the site: switch set to each linked to domain in turn,
aggregate the results, and then
return them to the user.

Each page could then have it's own customised Rollyo search equivalent. So, a possibly useful feature for a Rollyo toolbar, perhaps?

NB I'm not convinced that Rollyo does all it could. In particular, I think it only searches on a domain, which means I can't use it to search my OUseful blog, which actually lives down quite a long path...

SearchLinks

2005-11-10T00:22:00.000Z

Just a quick, quick post about something I'm doodling with - SearchLinks.

The basic idea is to be able to hover over a link and then perform a Google search using your own search terms over that domain.

The first rush is v ropey/brittle, but can be made to work if you're gentle with it. If you want to try it out, it's here at the moment...

In the roadmap is: 1) generalise the scripts to extract href info;2) improve usability; 3) Greasemonkey it; 4) get it on the Google Toolbar ;-)

PS I just stumbeled across this not totally dissimilar idea - page contextualised search from Yahoo, referred to as Y!Q Search

Me, Aggregated, Part 2

2005-11-08T14:59:00.000Z

It struck me driving in to work today that while Suprglu potentially provides me with single aggregated view of a variety of my web offerings, it doesn't let me search them...

But Rollyo does... doesn't it?

For example, here's my Rollyo enabled Suprglu page...

But it doesn't work properly :-(

For example, my OUseful blog can't be searched from the root domain... and I don't think the search on my Micro-Info blog at Blogger works either...

Ho hum...does anyone out there know of a php script (or js script) that will take a list of url's (as RSS? or OPML?) and mash them, perhaps one at a time, with a site: call to Google using the Google API, and then display a list of combined results?

Del.icio.us tags: rollyo suprglu

Me: Aggregated

2005-11-07T16:18:00.000Z

I just stumbled across Suprglu which seems to be some sort of "blog syndicator". Give the service a feed or two, from a blog, flickr or del.icio.us, for example, and it will aggregate everyting for you and republish it as a web page.

I think this may be useful, but I'm not sure how yet...

For an idea of what it does, here's me online...

Browser OS - A Single Application Operating System

2005-11-06T17:14:00.000Z

In his Observer column this week (Pitiful spectacle of an old DOS trying to do new tricks) John Naughton comments on the announcement of Microsoft Office Live:

"...a web service is technospeak for a computer function that is available via a browser rather than from a program running on your computer. A web search is an example. So are Hotmail and Google Mail, Maps, Froogle, Blogger and others.

"The idea of such services is almost as old as the web itself, but it is only with the advent of widespread broadband access that they have started to come into their own, because they can now offer levels of performance comparable to locally-running software.

"...to access web services, all you need is a browser - and it doesn't have to be Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. Nor does your computer have to run Windows. Firefox running on Linux or Safari running on a Mac are just as good for web mail or search as Explorer running on Windows."

Which got me thinking... What do I really need from my operating system, if I'm doing everything through a browser?

The browser would have to be quite a powerful one, of course - standards compliant, able to accept extensions, a robust (and quick) implementation of Javascript, etc.

It would also be handy if it came with a simple server that could serve text documents, like HTML, and XML, as well as multimedia files. (If Google Desktop can ship with a small browser included, I'm sure Mozilla could too).

So just looking at the browser, we'd quickly come up with quite a comprehensive list of requirements for the operating system, but hopefully less than if we had to support an open-ended number of unknown applications. (Or perhaps not - I never have taken an operating systems course...)

On the hardware side, too, there'd be a need to get all the right drievers in place. But what drivers would be shipped with our installer disk?

In my minimal, Browser Operating System (BOS), I'd only want access to the drivers I need for the system I've got.

Over the last 3 years, our home PC set-up has acquired two new external USB modems (one when we got broadband, when when I upgraded to a wireless router) and a new laser printer. It's also had to accept one new USB memory stick, a Palm docking station, a digital camera and an external music keyboard.

But those are peripherals, and I've found that most of them had obsolete or redundant drivers shipped with them, in the sense that the drivers were all available on product websites, and often in a higher version that the supplied driver.

Part of the point behind BOS is that we expect to be online most of the time, ideally with a persistent connection. Once I have the BOS customised for my hardware set-up, I don't really need a thousand and one drivers available, just in case I add a periheral, if I know I'm going to be able to install the appropriate driver from the web.

What I see for BOS, therefore, is a simple, if hefty, installation profiling client that looks at my system, works out what's there, gets the drivers I need, and bundles them for me with a single application - my heavyweight browser - in a customised BOS installer.

And that's what I install.

Just one application - the browser. Only the drivers I need. And only the supporting functions I need to get the browser to work on my particular system.

NB I do have to admit to cursing when asked for the Windows CD I don't have (this is a work's machine) when installing a new piece of hardawre, but one of the trade-off's runinng my lightweight BOS would be having to grab any future driver files I need from the net.

So although Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) is a real boon, my permanently connected machine running BOS should be able to make use of GPnP, shouldn't it? (Err, that's G for get, as in "get, Plug and Play", rather than "Gnu" or "Google"...)

And how would I know where to get the driver for my new gadget? Well, a clunky way would be to send the user to something like a TinyURL, perhaps via a path corresponding to the manufacturer and the particular product code of whatever I want to install?

Asides, (Timerolls) and Pingrolls

2005-11-05T12:57:00.000Z

Over on my other blog I just had call, within one post, to create another post containing an aside (i.e. self-contained footnote).

The process went as follows: as I was writing the first post, I created a second post, published it, got the persisitent URL and Trackback ping for that post and integrated them into the first post. Note that as a side-effect of the way I have set my blog up (the post date is when I created the post, not necessarily when I first published it*)

*here's another opportunity for an aside post, in partcular on what the correct time stamp for a blog post is? Created date? First saved timestamp? First published timestamp? Last published (e.g. following a reviosion) timestamp? Do we need timerolls (or editrolls) associated with each blog post, perhaps, delivering in the extreme case something like a MediaWiki page's History tab? Hmm - this use of roll sn't really ion keeping with the sense of the way it's used in blogroll, linkroll, or searchroll, through, is it?

I think a pingroll is, though - and this is another matter that arises from the way I use my other blog.

In particular, I've started included search links, rather than static links, on some occasions. For example, here's how I might refer to my writings in that blog on library toolbars. Note that I could also pull up a selection of links via a keyword search, category search or even a del.icio.us linkroll (I tend to bookmark and tag all my own postings...).

From this two things come to mind.

Firstly, a linkscript (scriptlink? That is, a Javascript include that will pull some content directly into a page) that will pull out all the links identified by the search, and perhaps include them as specific, unique but very generally labelled links (e.g. going through the list of links and including them in the page as: "here, here and here" for example).

Secondly, the need for a pingroll associated with the links that are pulled in. Now I don't know how sophisticated most blogging software is, but it would be nice if: 1) all pages came with an autodiscoverable Trackback/pingable URL; 2) all publishing systems polled all the links within a page, seeking out their ping IDs and sending a ping. (Can pings get retracted too, e.g by an unping?!)

Even if publishing systems were so enabled (with automated linkpingers(!)), the use of scriptlinks to pull in several links to a page using Javascript and perhaps the results from a call to a search engine may cause some problems. For example, if you just do a 'View Source' on a page that includes a scriptlink, all you'll see is reference to the script URL, rather than the code that the javascript causes to be displayed.

Unless, that is, you view source code using a tool like Jennifer Madden's View Rendered Source Firefox extension. Which is the sort of thing a linkpinger came with.

It might be interesting, though, if linkroll generators, however they're provided, also published pingrolls that mirrored the items referred to in a linkroll?

Del.icio.us tags: pingroll

Online Playgrounds, Part I: XSLT

2005-11-01T19:01:00.000Z

As background research for a possible new course on web technologies, I've been looking around for web-based scratchpads to allow students to play about a bit and get a feel for what's possible in environment with no real overhead in terms of installing or setting up software.

So to start things off, here's a link to Google's open source AJAXSLT toolkit. This library supports cross-platoform, browser based XSL transformations, which is really handy for displaying XML documents grabbed through xmlhttprequest, for example.

One thing that's particulalry neat about this, of course, is that it means you can set up a browser based playground for trying out XSL transformations (e.g. you can try out the demo that Google ship with the toolkit here).

Validating Link Rolls

2005-10-30T17:26:00.000Z

For some time I've been using the del.icio.us link roll script to display links from del.cio.us, and a variety of RSS to javascript services to render arbitrary RSS feeds in my own web pages.

The time has come, however, to stop relying on 3rd party scripts, and to run my own service. A quick trawl of the web turned up several PHP scripts, but I think the one I'll opt for is Feed2JS.

However, as with most of these services, the script is lacking in what I regard as a sensible extension - link checking. After all, why display a link if it's down?

So after another quick trawl, for link checkers this time, I think I'm going to mod this unliked URL checker, which as it stands looks through a list of links extracted from a database, and writes out a list of URLs that are down. The mod will of course just search through the links provided in the link roll, and only write out those that are sound.

There's a lot more can be done to add value to RSS2JS services, I think (at the expense of server load, of course), such as taking into account permanent redirects (as suggested in this blog on link maintenace in blog posts, and which actually quotes from this more comprehensive post on the ideal blog post).

Coping With Email: Is Hope the Only Way Out of Here?

2005-10-27T20:52:00.000+01:00

Although I manage to get the number of messages in my primary email Mailbox down to a manageable number every so often, I find as each day goes by that the number of unread and unfiled messages tends to increase inexorably, until I somehow catch a glimpse at the number of messages (over 1500 again!) and wonder at how to get the number down without the email equivalent of my annual end-of-year "sweep whatever's on and under my desk into a binbag" trick.

At one point I read Mark Hurst's G ood Experience: E-mail Management Report, Reducing E-mail Overload report, hoping it would tell me things I didn't know (and I have to admit it did prompt me to take another look at my filters), but the fixes didn't work for more than a week or two, and here I am again facing an email overflow...

So when I was pondering this on my drive home yesterday, I realised that a tool that might help me start to clear my mail box, and contribute to it's ongoing management, would be a tool that offered me hope that I was getting my mail under control.

And what is that tool? A simple display of a simple counter, or set of counts, of:

number of emails received today/yesterday/this week (let's call this R);
number of emails sent today/yesterday/this week (let's call this S);
number of emails deleted (D);
number of emails filed (F).

If in any given period (R+S) > (D+F), my Mailbox will have an increasing number of messages in it over that period. This is a Bad Thing.

If in any given period (R+S) = (D+F), my Mailbox will be in a steady state. Depending on how many messages are in the Mailbox, this may be a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

If in any given period (R+S) < (D+F), my Mailbox will have a decreasing number of messages in it over that period. This is a Good Thing.

Colour coding the net increase or decrease of messages in my Mailbox in realtime within the mailbox interface would let me know whether there was any hope in waging a war of attrition against my email clutter, or whether it was once again on the path to overwhelming me.

I mentioned this in passing to my mailadmin, who was taken enough by the idea to consider knocking up a widget for her preferred mail client (OpenText's FirstClass). If that comes to fruition, I'll give it a whirl and let you know how I get on!

PS this was my first blog post made with Flock and it was pleasingly straightforward...apart from the fact that I chose to blog the Good Experience page - which inserted a link into the post that I couldn't easily put text in front of without it being underlined and treated as part of the link... until I right-clicked and found a Discontinue Link option! And the fact that the bullet item button didn;t seem to work properly...

Search Rolls and Feed Annotation Streams

2005-10-13T14:15:00.000+01:00

As well as being able to subscribe in one fell swoop to every feed listed in a given feedroll, I also like the idea of being able to call on predefined searchrolls (e.g. that aggregate a list of OpenSearch-like search engines, or correspond to a particular Rollyo search profile) as part of an aggregation profile.

Taking the idea of meta one step further, it would also be useful to syndicate the result of particular searches (i.e. searches on particular terms) over all the sites contained in a searchroll. And I wonder whether fastreams would be a way of adding the search terms to a search roll to enable such functionality?

Aggregation Profiles

2005-10-13T10:15:00.000+01:00

With the increasing number of knowledge sources that are making themselves amenable to subscription via RSS, working out what to subscribe to to get coverage of a particular topic is likely to be increasingly problematic.

The availability of blogrolls and linkrolls are potentially exemplars of what I have been thinking of as aggregation profiles - or lists of things I can subscribe to on a particular topic.

It's easy to imagine a repository of such profiles, perhaps as an extension to Wikipedia entries, which gives users looking to subscribe to a variety of feeds in a given area (so they get an overview, or coverage, of that area) a good starting point.

One way I saw these working was to provide a user downloading an aggregation profile (or feedroll?) and offer an immediate subscription to all the feeds in that feedroll. A simple management dialogue, with the default of a ticked checkbox for every feed in the profile would allow users to customise the profile from a rich starting point.

Catching up on some unread posts today, I see the idea is in the elsewhere, with the proposal of RSS Readling Lists, which a user can subscribe to in toto, and which automatically passes through content from any, only and all the feeds contained in the reading list at any given time. (Note the element of customisaiton is not proposed in the reading list idea).

I look forward in my lazy web way to seeing the first few clients...

Social Developer Tools

2005-10-05T19:20:00.000+01:00

I've been holding off blogging about Ning, even though I managed to bookmark it quite early on (which has done my del.icio.us collaborative rank no end of good!), partly because a lot of people I read have been blogging the release announcement, partly becuase I couldn't think of anything to add application, or use wise.

For those of you who havent looked yet (or had a play yet - I wonder how long before I get my developer account?;-) Ning is, in part, a tool for building social software websites. If you run your own webserver, and are happy with PHP, Perl, or Ruby on Rails, I imagine there may be an element of so what? about this (apart from the high level of respect for what the Ning folks have achieved technically.

After all, if you want a social site, you can code it from scratch, right, or at least install something you found on Sourceforge, can't you?

Well - err - no, actually... That's just not really been possibile for most people until now, unless you knew a friendly sys admin that is.

But Ning changes that - because it appears that Ning will let you clone and run existing Ning applications with a variety of social tools in the mix for free - tagging, bookmarks, photo collections, geo- tools, review sites, and so on...

So where Ning is really neat, I think, is in the way that is socialises the creation of social website construction, or at least makes it possible for mortals to create their on social websites...

Another interesting element is the meta-sociality aspect, whereby it appears that Ning sites are socially interconnected to each other via tags, etc.

I haven't yet thought through this side in much detail, but when I do it'll be in the context of elearning and distance education, and probably over on my OUseful blog.

Rich browser applications: email example

2005-09-30T18:54:00.000+01:00

Although browsers have supported javascript for years, it's only recently (in the last year or so) that powerful/rich applications have become readilyavailable.

This screencast describes Zimbra, an open source rich browser based email client. It's worth looking at, not least to see how it compares to the OU First Class conferencing system. It would be even more interesting if the folks at FirstClass took a look at the AJAX client...

If you're interested in how traditional email clients may be extended with a tasteful, added value pop-up windowsd, watch the screencast...
If you're interested in how a screencast can be used to communicate an overview of how to use an application, watch the screencast.
If you're interested in the sorts of things you can do in a modern browser, watch the screencast.
If you have too much time on your hands ;-), watch the screencast...

For technical info, there's a couple of white papers, one about the system architecture and one about the AJAX Toolkit underpinning it all.

Separating Navigation from Content and Style?

2005-09-23T09:46:00.000+01:00

With the latest A9 Toolbar, website designers now have an opportunity to embed site navigation information into a drop down menu from the toolbar by publishing a descriptive siteinfo.xml document at the root of their site.

The sitinfo document allows you to insert cascading menus, and site search links, into the toolbar dymanically, so whenever a user is visiting the site, the toolbar can provide a navigational system alongside any navigaiton embedded within the page.

For example, here's a snapshot of a quick test of a possible structure for some of my OUseful pages:

Now as it stands, I'm not sure how useful this is going to be. Site designers typically like to embed navigation within a browser page, conforming to colour themes and site style, and so on. Indeed, the navigational style and structure can often be one of thedefining features of a site.

Similarly for users - when they visit a site they typically look within the main window for site related information. Although it is increasingly possible for site designers to make use of browser control buttons, and exploit any installed toolbars (as A9 are hoping to do), for most users their focus of attention is within th main window.

That said, the sitinfo looks interesting in terms of the Skeletal Web. I first doodle about this when Google announced their Sitemap, suggesting that the time had possibly come for separating navigation out from content and style.

The Google sitemap definition, however, does not fit that purpose so well - it's more of a brute force technology for helping search engines locate searchable pages within a website. (Then again, it would have been interesting if the A9 siteinfo definition could have accommodated the Google sitemap structure somehow!)

With the siteinfo document, however, the emphasis is on defining navigational structures that are directed towards the user. (Again, the Google sitemap reflects the simplicity of Google search - all they want is lists of URLs, searchable by keywords). And this is where it might get interesting...

For example, consider the following:

The Skeletal Web Pages are published without style, e.g. as web feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.). The siteinfo document acts a bit like a Feed Annotation Stream [are these still in play - or has the idea stalled?]. That is, they place an (optional) navigational context around a single post feed, or palce a blog feed in the wider context of its parent site, for example.

<link rel="siteinfo" href="navigation/mynav.xml" type="text/siteinfo" /> Pull the navigational structures into a page, just like you pull in stylesheet info. (I wonder why A9 didn't try for this approach as an 'alternate' rel link?) It's not hard to imagine how this could be used either in a toolbar (as A9 have done) or a browser sidebar, for example).

XMLHttpRequest Pull the navigational structures into a page using XMLHttpRequest, and then render it within the page. 'Localising' the user's current location within the site will require a little workaround, admittedly.

Frames In frame based sites, its easy to open a 'content' page in its own window and lose all the navigational structures. Not any more...

Widgets, Gadgets, etc. How about having a navigation console to your website in nicely branded Konfabulator widget? Please take it as read that this is an implied lazyweb request for an Amazon.com navigation widget!

Site Views Just as it's possible to have different visual styles associated with a site, how about different navigational views (each with their own sitemap.xml definition)? For pages that do separate navigation from content, a navigation equivalent to URIid (which allows users to skin arbitrary websites with their own css styling) would allow users to add their own navigations structure to a site.

To sum up then, as it stands I thinkthat if siteinfo is usedjust by the A9 toolbar, it won't go anywhere. But if the playful community get hold of it, generalise it a bit (away from a fixed name siteinfo.xml in a fixed location (i.e. at the root of a website: http://foo.bar/siteinfo.xml) and start playing with mash-ups, it could be quite revolutionary... (or not!)

Gadgets Hot On the Heels of Widgets

2005-09-19T12:42:00.000+01:00

It wasn't so long after I got my first Konfabulator widget that Google Desktop extensions came in to play. Now it seems like the third of the tussling three (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) want to play too: Microsoft Gadgets for the Windows Sidebar...

OpenSearch Description Format Embraces HTML Search Engines

2005-09-19T10:27:00.000+01:00

Chasing down the announcement of the IE7 mash-up with OpenSearch (IEBlog : IE7 and OpenSearch: Behind the scenes) using the OpenSearch 1.1 format, it seems that the new spec allows developers to define an interface to an (X)HTML web search, as well as RSS search services.

For example, here's a snippet from the draft OpenSearch 1.1 spec:

<Url type="text/html"
       method="post"
       template="https://intranet/search?format=html">
    <Param name="s" value="{searchTerms}"/>
    <Param name="p" value="{startPage?}"/>
    <Param name="c" value="{count?}"/>
    <Param name="l" value="{language?}"/>
  </Url>

It'll be interesting to see whether the Firefox community embraces OpenSearch now. The last time I checked (a couple of months ago now, admittedly), I didn't come across any extensions that exploited the OpenSearch format (this was one I could see it being used), but things may have changed now... Time for a visit to the Moxilla ectensions site, methinks...

And how about Konfabulator? Are they gonna get in there too, I wonder?

Microsoft Embraces OpenSearch?

2005-09-16T23:44:00.000+01:00

I've blogged a few times about A9's Open Search, so when this post - IEBlog : IE7 and OpenSearch: Behind the scenes - appeared on the IE blog, it caught my eye.

Here's a snippet:

It’s been a lot of fun working with A9. But, this is just the beginning. The OpenSearch spec occupies a special place because it intersects 3 important communities – browser, search and RSS. We want to hear from all of you. My dream is that OpenSearch is adopted by all the browsers and millions of sites (Internet and Intranets) and that a significant percentage of these sites also expose RSS.

I'm still waiting for the OpenSearch Konfabulator widget, or a corresponding Google Desktop extension...

A Three Way Battle? Fighting to Dominate Search, the Desktop, and the Data Web

2005-09-16T22:54:00.000+01:00

The pace of the web at the moment is frightening - every time I take a couple of days away, there's another announcement.

I've just come back to the blogosphere after a few days away, and it seems that Google have just got in to blog searching (Google Blog Search, announcement) though many of the reports I've read on it so far have been unimpressed (I'd list them - but it's late... bad form I know but I didn't bookmark them anywhere...)

It strikes me that there are battles raging on several fronts at the moment -here's just a few things that have caught my eye:

On the Desktop

Microsoft think they own it, of course, but Yahoo!'s investment Konfabulator, and Google's new improved Google Desktop are both plays of a sort for that valuable screen real estate.

In the Persoanlised Search Arena

There's also the battle for the personalised search portal too, and again Google got in there outside the Beta this week (Personalised Google Homepage, announcement), though surely Yahoo My Web can't be far behind. Cpome to think of it, I haven't heard much about the MSN Start personal portal for a bit. In any case, none of them have got anything (IMHO) on the almost ultimately customisable Netvibes (I wonder when they'll support drag and drop placement of panels!)

For the Data Web
RSS is coming on strong, and is likely to take of further as it gets rebranded as web feeds. IE7 will make a strong play for RSS, as will Longhorn, and we all know that Firefox can make more than a little use of the format.

PS Along with Google's BlogSearch, there's also the quietly released MSN feed search and what I think was the the first feed search from the big guns, Yahoo's feed search.

PS Now why couldn't I have put it like this..?

Del.icio.us tags: web2.0

Personal Book Catalogues - Time for a 'Course Books' Service?

2005-09-16T18:15:00.000+01:00

Sometime ago, before I got into blogging, I tussled with the idea of what Amazon Academic might look like. The leverage would come from students and academics listing courses required on a particular course in a 'course wishlist', or some such (now I realise you'd just tag the books with a course code or course ID...).

There were several possible benefits - for potential students wanting to see what sorts of stuff they'd be letting themsleves in for if they took the course (they would of course be able to browse inside a book on Amazon, or via Google print); for academics, looking to see what the rest of the academic community was recommending their students to read; for the students - possibly - having a comprehensive booklist with single click purchase or library reservation etc etc.

At the time, I thought you could get quite a long way into this by repurposing Amazon wishlists, but now there are a few 'social book cataloguing' sites that would suit the bill admirably.

Reader2 has very pretty AJAX interface that pulls in book covers from your tagged and catalogued books, and by now standard tag-based URL addressing scheme (e.g. guess what sort of books you'd find addressed like this: http://reader2.com/tag/robot?

Library Thing is another social book cataloguing site that again offers users the option of tagging their books, and sharing those tags with others.

When I get a chance, I'll try and pop up a screencast comparing these two sites. In the meantime, if you know of a link to a good review, or even a screencast of either of these sites in action, please post a comment, or perhaps tag it for me (psychemedia) via del.icio.us...

Revisiting the Skeletal Web (or Widgets aren't Toolbars)

2005-08-17T23:16:00.000+01:00

This recent Science Library Pad post on rethink[ing] your model of the net: data + protocol + interface reminded me of a previous doodle on the skeletal web and got me thinking about the various ways to use Konfabulator style widgets.

Richard (Akerman)'s thesis is that web (service) publishers should be providing "primarily DATA and PROTOCOLS to your users, not interfaces. Let them build their own interfaces to suit their needs." and I quite agree.

The recent hive of activity surrounding BBC RSS feeds (or should that be web feeds?) encouraged by the launch several weeks ago of BBC Backstage has shown how creative people can be with reusable content.

And the upsurge in interest surrounding Konfabulator widgets has opened up the possibility of webscripting on the desktop.

However, I think the call to embrace a view of the net as "data + protocol + interface" is in danger of hiding a pretty major (though unnecessary) assumption - in particular: "data + protocol + browser based interface".

Why do I think this? Let me refer you to another Science Library Pad post, this time CISTI becomes Konfabulous - Search Widget, which describes a search widget for the CISTI catalogue that also allows you to check what you have out on loan.

Now this got me excited, because I've been meaning to build just such a search widget for the Open University Library catalogue and I thought I'd be able to repurpose the CISTI one...

...but it turns out that the widget, along with most of the other search widgets in the Konfabulator gallery, is just a desktop search box. Enter a search term, hit return, and your browser will fire up and take you to the search results page.

Now to me, that's pretty much the same as moving a browser toolbar onto the desktop, and using it to trigger various actions within the main browser window.

There are usability advantages to this, I guess - the widget takes up less screen real estate, so I'm perhaps more likely to have this widget open and ready for use than a browser window. But still, the browser is invoked to display the results.

Now, what I had in mind for my library widget was something that would be self contained and display my library record, and perhaps the top search results froma catalogue query, in the widget itself.

This needn't take a lot of work, and here's why:

1) There are more than a few RSS reader widgets out there (e.g. I've blogged about how to use the MultiNewsReader widget in a distance education setting for delivering news items here and here) that can be used to display live RSS feeds.

2) An increasing number of search engines provide an RSS feed (Google entered the fray not too long ago, of course, but let's not forget all the engine's that support A9's OpenSearch RSS format).

Putting the two together, and the implementation path is straightforward enough. However, the widget is only likely to be useful if it only has to display a limited number of search results, each of which must contain enough information to be useful (for example, a dictionary definition, a list of library books on loan, or a search of new library books in a particular topic area).

I was going to pop an image here showing an example of what an OpenSearch result looks like in the RSS reader widget (see the post mentioned in the PS below for an example query) but I can;t get image uploads to work properly in Blogger, so you'll have to do without :-(just use the query as an RSS feed address in the reader).

PS I've blogged before about Using RSS for Data Interrogation, and mentioned there the surprising lack of interest regarding Firefox extensions that exploit OpenSearch. It would be a shame if there were similar disinterest for novel OpenSearch mash-ups in the widget building community...

Del.icio.us tags: RSS search opensearch konfabulator widget

Easy Peasy Google Maps Labels

2005-08-11T12:57:00.000+01:00

This is has been blogged around to death recently*, which is why I decided not to post anything, becuase it wouldn't be adding anything anything new...

But here it is anyway: want to add your own text to a Google map label? simple add +(Your text in brackets) to the search term, like this: This is where I work...

So - how to make this post a little different? Err - how about this: I'm not really into using FOAF, but it would be handy if there was somewhere I could made particular, specific contact details avaliable. Like http://del.icio.us/psychemedia/personal/homepage or http://del.icio.us/psychemedia/personal/workLocation, for example... They come as RSS, too, of course: http://del.icio.us/rss/psychemedia/personal/blog

I'm not sure if del.icio.us supports unshareable tags yet? That is, I don't really want to be able to look at the personal/homepage tag for every del.icio.us user at the same time - I just want to look up that particular profile item for a single user at a time.

Addendum - not done to death it seems...funny how coming to a backlog of a few days news mucks up your perception of what's happening in the blogosphere. Whay seems to have happened is that in a marathon catch-up news reading session I'd read three posts in quick succession on the topic (two of which were trackbacks to Paul Miller's original post on A ridiculously easy way to add arbitrary text to Google Maps) and not paid attention to the common root (which I then unconsciously ripped off in the title of this post...).
So - not done to death, just a really neat discovery in one of Paul's last few posts, I guess, to the Common Information Environment blog.

Autodiscovering OpenURLs

2005-08-09T14:21:00.000+01:00

OpenURL defines a URL syntax using the HTTP GET request format that allows users to pass bibliographic information to an OpenURL resolver and retrieve a published article. (See also
this article on OpenURL in scholarly environments).

There have recently been all manner of postings in the blogosphere about COinS (ContextObjects in Spans), which seeks to embed OpenURL data in a <span> statement to support straightforward OpenURL Autodiscovery, such as autodiscovery via a bookmarklet.

I like this idea - almost a lot - but can't help feeling a true microformat approach would offer more potential (similarly for Dublin Core).

Just in passing, this conversation appears to offer a history of COinS, and this early post sought a way of embedding OpenURL info in Dublin Core metadata.

CustoMyScripting for the Desktop...

2005-07-29T17:54:00.000+01:00

Over the last few months I've been having a fine old time annotating other people's webpages with doodles of my own using Greasemonkey. So when the Yahoo Buys Maker of 'Widget' Applications hit the blogosphere a few days ago, I fell in lurrrvvvvvve.......

In the same way that Greasemonkey lets you script what you like in a random webpage, Konfabulator lets you script widgets for the desktop in a relatively painless way. So roll on customyscripting (or customiscripting....?) My computer is my toy, so I'd like to be able to play with it how I want to... And this make sit a lot easier...:-)

Doubtless the novelty will wear off in a few days, although not, I think, for the RSS widgets, which are alredy proving useful to me...

With Microsoft and others promissing to get into RSS in a big way in the near future, this is one way of trying out RSS-fed stuff on the desktop in the meantime....

Del.icio.us tags: RSS konfabulator greasemonkey customyscripting customiscripting

Feed Annotation Streams: Keeping it Simple..

2005-07-29T12:43:00.000+01:00

As work on the RSS Feed Annotation Streams proceeds, Matt has commented: "the spec needs to be presented with some form of ping service which is going to take a bit more time to set up. I am happy for others to develop ideas based on my original proposal - which I want to keep as simple as possible to allow for maximum exploration of possible application layers."

I quite agree with simplicity being essential if the FAS spec is to get widely adopted, but (sorry....) I was thinking on my way home last night how one major possible use of FAS is annotatiing stories with images, movies, and perhaps audio - ie. media annotations ( = enclosures).

So just to raise the question, if only to shoot it down, FAS is proposed as a lightweight complement to e.g. RSS (NB should FAS apply equally to Atom feeds etc?). What if the spec instead were a minor extension to RSS/Atom?

----------------------

PS Some links are used in blogs etc. to provide 'more info' about a topic (e.g. the faux Wikipedia RSS link above). To what extent is the semantics of this an annotation?

PPS Many blogs quote particular sections from other blogs, as in the opening paragraph to this post. To what extent then is this post an annotation of the quoted paragraph (I know, I know, the sense in which I'm using annotation is starting to drift, but this is brainstorm mode ;-)? Could I use this post as an annotation that references the roginal quote via e.g. a URI and XPath? (This makes assumption that the structure of the original posting will remain the same of course...)

----------------------

Del.icio.us tags: RSS fastreams

Widgets for CV Maps...

2005-07-26T17:25:00.000+01:00

To make for an intersting application, CV Maps (or lifeplot maps?!) need to have 'fallout zones' centred on particular locations.

The Google Maps API does lines, but not circles, so when I saw this post - Eric's Archived Thoughts: Working With Google Maps - and Eric's HYDEsim demo, it brought the tempatation to actually go and prototype a CV Map in a lazy reuse everything and anything way, a little bit closer...

The only thing is - I don't want to pop my CV up on the public web, let alone a map of it... so - any offers? Do you have a CV you'd like to see being used for the first CV map prototype? ;-)

Del.icio.us tags: RSS cvmap googlemaps

RSS Feed Annotation Streams

2005-07-26T16:59:00.000+01:00

Pace on the BBC Backstage mailing list (archived here) is franctic as ever, with new prototypes popping up every couple of days.

A key driver of the activity (at the moment at least) is the provision by the BBC of RSS feeds that have been opened up for remixing use by the community. But even though the BBC have been generous with what they are making available, we always want more...

As a result, one strand that's being developed in the Backstage community at the moment - and that I think has potentially broad appeal - is the idea of RSS Annotation Stream: Data Mining: Feed Annotation Streams.

The gist of the idea is that users may want to annotate RSS stories with additional info - at the moment, geotagging syndicated BBC news stories is particularly hot, given the wide variety of mapping applications being devleoped for BBC news feeds using the Google maps API.

Here's what Matt Hurst has mooted as a stating point for the RSS Annotation spec:

<annotationStream feedURL="original-feed-url" annotationURI="URI-for-annotation-service" feedRead="date" annotationStreamWrite="date">
<annotation guid="item-guid">

</annotation>
</annotationStream>

As I read it, the annotationStream idea allows a user to provide a set of annotations that can be applied to a particular original feed. But what if I want to define a feed that is a combination of several distinct annotationStreams defined at quite a high level?

I wonder if there is any merit in going a step further and having an annotationMix (or annotationPatch?) (that may or may not be an annotationStream?) that:

1) contains one or more <useAnnotationStream annotationURI="URI-for-annotation-service" /> tags, and

2) defines which bits of those various annotations from each feed should be used in the final annotationMix?

This extension needn't go as far as defining an XSLT to remix the final feed, but would be useful as a config file for a mixer of several feeds, perhaps, or setting up an XSLT to generate the final annotated/mixed feed?

It will be interesting to see what other communities might pick up on RSS annotations, because I have a feeling this idea might run and run....

Del.icio.us tags: RSS fastreams

CV Maps

2005-07-05T22:39:00.000+01:00

For some reason, I've been thinking about CVs lately, and it struck me that it may be amusing to combine Google Maps with my CV...

The release of the Google Maps API means it's now quite straightforward to produce your own annotated maps, even without having to resort to something like MyGmaps.

So until I get round to producing a demo/dummy CV (do you really think I'd publish nmy life history on the public web?), what would the CV map look like?

Well, the way I imagine it is to have a series of markers coloured blue to red (for temperature, or recency), and perhaps with symbol identifier (school, HEI, etc.) with information panels that describe what happened when at places identified by the markers (qualifications at school, for example, university degree, membership of local golf club, or previous/current employer(s) etc.). Also in the info panel would be a link to the appropriate institution web page.

Depending on where you currently live, you could set a preference for a 'happy to work with x miles of home' transparent image overlaid on the map and centred on your home address. Slightly more sophistictaed would be a 'happy to work with half-an-hour of home' transparent overlay, which would (with a bit of route-planning help) provide a better estimate of the places you'd be happy to commute to. (This feature would probably be helpful to the CV-owning job-hunter, too...)

I couldn't imagine this being of the slightest bit of interest to the personnel department of a large corporate organisation, of course, but it would add a bit of colour, and might easily provide an automated visualisation of a CV that's been authored in a structured authoring environment...

And for why? Err - why not? If nothing else, it would be an applied testbed for learning how to do transparent overlays and time-based route planning in Google Maps;-)

And the revenue generating opportunities are obvious to keep the site ticking over - job advert feeds from employers in your commuting zone, fund-raising requests from your university alumni association, sponsored links in from Friends Reunitied (err - perhaps not ;-)

Del.icio.us tags: RSS cvmap googlemaps

OUseful Info

2005-06-24T00:58:00.000+01:00

It feels like an age since I posted here, and checking out the dates of the previous posting suggests the same... The main reason (or one of them) has been time spent elsewhere - for example on my "institutional blog": OUseful Info.

OUseful Info tracks my thinking on matters and hacks relating to the Open University, and in particular (at the moment) tools geared towards the OU Library.

Recent postings there include a few thoughts on library toolbars, and a doodle on why e-learning's not just about web pages (more on that soon...).

Towards the Skeletal Web

2005-06-06T23:46:00.000+01:00

The blogosphere went a little crazy last week with the announcement of the Google Sitemaps initiative, but in the true spirit of scholarly research I thought I'd jot down my own thoughts before seeing what everyone else has written...

My immediate impression, and one that I fired off to a couple of OU conferences the day the initiative was released, was that this seemed to me like Google trying to get webmasters to do a lot of the grunt work wrt site mapping. (For readers who haven't come across the thread before now Google are proposing that webmasters publish an XML site map somewhere obvious, and upload a copy to Google).

There's nothing really new about this, I guess - after all, Amazon has long been using the co-developer/user community to build Amazon storefronts with the Amazon e-commerce API...

The second thing that came to mind was - will all my separate Blogger pages now be described in a blog sitemap? (That would be handy...)

The third thought that struck me was what this might mean in terms of republishing the web...

Let me explain: one way of categorising websites is to look at them as: 1) content pages, 2) presented with some styling/branding (and extraneous advertising!), 3) organised according to the site architecture.

It's easy enough to lose the style gubbins by simply republishing each page as unstyle XML, or even RSS, but there is then a problem for the user wishing to navigate your site (other than by maintaining a sitewide RSS link'n'highlights feed). However, if the sitemap becomes widely used, as it may with the weight of Google behind it, and probably will if the other search engines get into it too, then it will provide a way of navigating the feed web easily.

So imagine - I stumble across a web page (a real web page one day, that I like the content of, and that also suggests a good site behind it. Considerate as the designer is, the page is <link /> tagged with references to the RSS feed for the page (in a standardised form easily derived from the URI of the (X)HTML page) and also to the sitemap (e.g. <link rel="sitemap" href="http://wherever.com/sitemap.xml" />)...

...and now the site is mine...I can provide my own navigation, style the content pages as I wish, and dump the ads and extra pages...

The scene is now set for the fourth thought - suppose that del.icio.us+ gets on the case, and people start tagging up site maps. Rather than be forced to navigate the site via the sitemap hierarchy, perhaps new structures will emerge based on individual interpretations of tag sets and clusters. Could it be that site remixes will become more popular than the sites themselves (as as historically been the case with accessible versions of complex, media rich sites?

It will be fun to see...

Del.icio.us tags: google RSS

Using RSS for Data Interrogation

2005-06-01T22:29:00.000+01:00

In my previous post on RSS <textinput /> search queries I recalled an even earlier posting on how it would be cool to have an RSS search facility on Firefox.

My occasional searches for such an extension have to date been futile, which got me wondering about whether the functionality is already there? That is, can I subscribe to an OpenSearch query feed, for example, in Firefox as it stands, or using one of the RSS reader extensions?

So, just to provide a bit of context, here's an RSS returning search on Jon Udell's Infoworld site taken from A9.com:

http://a9.com/-/opensearch/search/B0007WF74K/screencast?count=10&startPage=1

Just by having this feed abvailable, do we get any emergent functionality for free by plugging it into other stuff that's laying around (a bit like network effects Jon himself observed were possible).

My first thought was the Sage extension, which does allow queries into a couple of sites that already provide an RSS search. However, outside of hackingthe XPI package, there didn't seem to be an obvious way to add another feed.

Second up was the possibility of adding a particular OpenSearch query to the Firefox search tool. This is normally easy enough (for example, here's how I added the an OU Library search to Firefox), but from my limited understanding of it requires searches of the form http://whatever.long/path/name?q1=searchterm1&q2=searchterm2 etc. Without a simple URL Rewrite (which I don't have access to from where I'm writing now) I couldn't see how to fit this into the Firefox search extension definition.

Thirdly, and this seems a bit of a cop-out (though it does work), was simply to use a keyword search. The format of the search I'll use will be udell %s, which will search infoworld.com using the search terms captured in the %s variable. Rather than just display the search results as raw RSS, I'll shove them through an RSS2HTML service. If you'd like to try it yourself, here's the keyword search bookmarklet. Alternatively, here's a quick demo of a search on firefox search.

This approach would be muuch simplified (and generalisable) if the OpenSearch definition file (or the A9 ID of the feed) were autodiscoverable. For example, something like this should do the trick for the InfoWorld search: <link rel="opensearch@A9" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://a9.com/-/opensearch/search/B0007WF74K/" title="Infoworld A9 OpenSearch Feed" />.

Del.icio.us tags: RSS search opensearch

RSS: As Good for Search as for Syndication?

2005-06-01T15:20:00.000+01:00

Having just taken receipt of Beginning RSS and Atom Programming I thought it was about time I actaully scanned over the RSS and Atom definitions again...

One optional tag I had completely forgotten about(if indeed I ever knoew about it...) in the RSS 0.9x and 2.0 definitions is the textinput element. I guess this is partly because all the feed generators I reuse don't bother with it...

Using RSS for syndicating content is one thing, but I find more and more that I am consuming RSS in all sorts of ways, oftentimes preferring the RSS-Web to the HTML web. This is partly due to the fact that it's the information I'm invariably after rather than website advertising.

Discovering the information I want is, of course, one of the major issues - this surely is where the <textinput /> tag comes in... It could very easily be used to reveal the search function on whatever is generating the RSS feed I'm reading.

As far as blogs go, I often keep referring to the same few, well-heeled ones, as well searching blogs in general via the Feedster column on my A9 OpenSearch panel.

So- what I shall look at doing with my RSS feeds, is look at ways of inclduing a search link, via a <textinput /> tag, that produces results in an OpenSearch RSS format.

How would this change the look of my aggregator? If my aggregator allows me to inspect the contents of a single feed, it would make sense for a single search box to be reconciled with the RSS search feed for that particular feed. Where my aggregator is displaying information from several feeds at once, the search box could perhaps fire off a search request to all of them at the same time, and aggregate the results.

There is a lot of potential, I think, for syndicating search information for a feed, well as just the most recent content elements. The potential for a Firefox OpenSearch extension is still also there...

Update
Since originally posting this note, I 've read a couple of other posts today that mention the <textinput /> tag. For example, this post on Russell Beattie's blog talks about using the <textinput /> tag to capture comment feedback. If you subscribe to the feed from his blog in e.g. Bloglines, tyou can even see it in action.

Del.icio.us tags: RSS opensearch search

WADL: Describing RESTful Web Applications

2005-05-27T13:45:00.000+01:00

Every so often, I tinker with developing little web apps, such as the OUseful book search, but never really document the API as well as I should.

So when I stumbled across Marc Hadley's Web Application Description Language Language (WADL), I saw an answer to some of my documentation problems.

The most recent thing I've been tinkering with is an RSS item webpage scroller, based on a tool I saw Brian Kelly from UKOLN use a few weeks ago, that scrolls through a list of websites (you'll need to enable pop-ups in your browser to use it). (I actually built a page that does something similar to Brian's tool quite some time ago that cycles through CRRN members' web pages, but it's not really reusable...)

The idea of the RSS feed scroller - which at the moment I have locked down to del.icio.us RSS feeds - is that you pass it a feed location stub and the scroller then cycles through the website items. So for example, here's what's popular on del.icio.us.

The service still uses a pop-up - when I get a chance I'll probably make it frame based - and is little more than proof of concept, but it's enough for the purpose of this post which if you remember is actually about WADL...

So - rather than use prose to describe how to call the service, how does this partial WADL fragment look?


<resources>
 <resource uri="http://http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/magpierss/scroller.php">
  <operation name="ScrollRSSlinks" method="get">
   <request>
     <parameter name="q" type="xsd:string" required="true" />
     <parameter name="td" type="xsd:integer" />
     <parameter name="num" type="xsd:integer" />
   </request>
   <response>
    <representation mediaType="text/html" />
   </response>
  </operation>
  </resource>
 </resources>

Looking at this, a little bit of explamnation is required:
- q is the query that gets used in an expression of the form http://del.icio.us/$q - so it must point to an RSS feed (hmm - I could tweak that...)
- td is the time delay in seconds between showing each page. There is a separate (currently fixed) delay before starting the 'show' itself;
- num is the maximum number of pages to scroll through before going back to the start.

Del.icio.us tags: WADL RSS rest delicious

Extending Firefox into bbctags

2005-05-14T16:11:00.000+01:00

In an earlier post, (Micro-info: Backstage, The BBC Opens Up a Little More) I posted a link to a Greasemonkey script that modifies BBC News pages so that story links to point to the bbctags site instead.

To use the script requires that you install Greasemonkey of course, which not everyone want to do... so when I found the Greasemokey compiler, that takes a Greasemonkey script and generates a fully blown Firefox extension from it, I thought I'd give it a go: download bbctags localiser extension, then File/Open it. (The direct installation won't work until I can persuade someone to add the correct application/x-xpinstall Mime Type to the server config.)

Once you have the extension installed, pop along to the BBC News website and check out a few stories...you should find when you click on a story link that you end up at the bbctags version of the site.

Del.icio.us tags: greasemonkey bbcapi bbctags bbcapi firefox

Teasing Google

2005-05-13T00:43:00.000+01:00

A couple of amusing items about Google caught my eye the other day - this rather nifty spoof about a Google Content Blocker, and this newscast fromthe future about the rise of Googlezon.

And they sort of got me thinking about what other Google related trifles and amusing curiosities there might be out there... a stack of Greasemonkey aplications of course, but nothing that subversive...

...like a spoof on Google AdWords, such as Google AdBust...

So what I'm loking for is an RSS feed at words, or an image retrieving webservice at best, that allows me to subvert (in the comfort of my own borwser, of course) the ads Google tries to send me... you know the sorts of ad I mean, I think: something along the lines of the ads on AdBusters or the spoofs on funny-adverts.com...

Del.icio.us tags: greasemonkey google

Backstage, The BBC Opens Up a Little More

2005-05-13T00:05:00.000+01:00

BBC Backstage hit blogs yesterday with the announcement of their new developer network. The Backstage developer network announcement comes hot on the heels Creative Archive announcement last month, which I blogged about in the context of the eOpen University.

All(!) that's up for grabs at the moment are the Beeb's RSS feeds, and the content they contain, which can now be used to provide content to 3rd party sites. But what's promised is a BBC API in the BBC search engine, and an intriguiing sound postcode related tool.

Already there are several demo sites up giving a taste of what can be expected from a community that is now free to play with the BBC RSS feeds pretty much as it likes... Just like Amazon and Google, the Beeb perhaps realises that the future is closer if its co-invented by the users...

Anyway - one of my favourite early demos is the bbctags service, which allows you to tag news stories as in delicious, though the difference ihere is that tags only apply to BBC stories. Part of the release blurb states: "Users have their own tags page to aggregate bookmarked stories, and they can also view a global tags page showing the most popular and recent tags used by all users. There is also a tag search facility across a users' tags or the whole tag space." All pretty much as you'd expect, then...

The service is still quirky in places - e.g. I accidentally added the same tag to a page twice and the tag now appears twice as page mark up - but hopefully the site will be being maintained for at least a couple of iterations.

Having to share a login rather than having a personal login is also something of a constraint to usability in the current incarnation, but I guess this was acceptable enough for the site to be released as a proof of concept.

One thing that caught me out was that when I did a search from the bbctags page I got a results page from the BBC that just linked back to the main BBC site. That is, the returns from the search led directly to the story on the BBC site, rather than the tag enabled version on the bbctags site.

So.......for Firefox users with Greasemonkey installed, here's a first attempt at a script that converts BBC news feed URLs to bbctags URLs.

Now I can search the BBC news site for stories, and automatically have the story link redirected to the bbctags site...:-)

PS. to see what the BBC have to say about BBC Backstage themselves, check out this (taggable) report that proclaims Developers to play with BBC wares, or this (taggable) one describing how the BBC eases rules on news feed use.

Del.icio.us tags: greasemonkey bbcapi bbctags

Wep Page Plus: A Personal Semantic Browser?

2005-04-27T00:43:00.000+01:00

If you haven't yet come across the Firefox Greasemonkey extension, you haven't lived... Greasemonkey is one of the trailblazing tools for developing client side javascript web intermediaries that let you wreak havoc with other peoples' websites in the comfort of your own browser (some of the issues arising around the use of Greasemonkey can be found in this post on Greasemonkey: an Historical Perspective).

For the maverick employee, corporate fool or renegade web tinkerer, with too much time - or too little sleep - on their hands, Greasemonkey combined with URIid provides the perfect forum for customising other peoples' websites just the way you like them. In case you haven't already come across it, URIid is another of those pesky Firefox extensions that provides power to the people - in this case, allowing you to skin other peoples' sites according to your own taste...

So - the next time you have an idea for an extra bit of functionality, see the need for a bit of radical personalisation, or can't put up with someone else's site desgin, customise the page display yourself and put it right in your own browser...

Alternatively, if your webmaster can't see why you're proposing a particular change, or doesn't appreciate the suggestions you're making for a site overhaul, rebuild the site locally and show them the benefits directly...

Del.icio.us tags: greasemonkey css semanticweb webpp

Delicious Reverse Lookups Reveal Pages' "Implicit" Keyword Metadata...

2005-04-27T00:10:00.000+01:00

I know I should make use of it, but I still haven't got into the swing of using Dublin Core Metadata in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements. For those of you who aren't familiar with metadata, it's a preliminary step on the road to the semantic web, that machine readable infosphere where machines can help humble flesh and blood users navigate the apparently boundless virtual space that is the world wide web.

A step further back from Dublin Core metadata are un-name spaced meta tags, such as <meta name="keyword" content="micro-content, delicious, metadata, folksonomy" /> - but even then, more of my pages than not fail to capture even this search-engine friendly information (perhaps that's why my sites get so few hits?!)

Anyway - so much for the intro...a thought that occurred to me today was "so what if I forget to add keyword metadata to my pages...if they get tagged by del.icio.us users, then surely I should be able to look up the related del.icio.us tags and see how other people have rated the page... In case you were wondering, there is an experimental delicious bookmarking bookmarklet that displays the tags other people have used to categorise the current page...with a tiny bit of scraping, it shouldbe easy enough to just pull out the tags used to describe a particular page...?

Or perhaps a switch already exists in the del.icio.us API? For sure, the Scrumptious extension for Firefox produces a tag list for the currently loaded page...

This leads naturally to the idea of a deliciously opportunistic keyword metadata tagger script, provided as a server-side function call, or perhaps even client side js call, that creates an HTML meta tag with keyword data pulled from the tags used to described the delicious bookmarks that link to the page... Admittedly, it wouldn't be much use if the page was unbookmarked...

UK Postcode Linker Using Greasemonkey

2005-04-04T23:09:00.000+01:00

Jon Udell's recent screencast on a combination of his library lookup bookmarklets with the Greasmonkey Firefox extension forced me to sort out a postcode script for Greasemonkey.

The script can be found here and when activated it will convert UK postcodes found on a web page to a link to a Multimap map centred on the postcode, and a second link that provides directions there from my place of work (provided by a postcode embedded in the script).

PS. The actual script for Udell's library/Amazon Greasemonkey script can be found from this follow up blog posting.

Del.icio.us tags: greasemonkey postcode

Prompt or User Selection Bookmarklets: Postcodes & UK dialing Codes

2005-04-04T22:54:00.000+01:00

I have been doodling for some time with a series of bookmarklets that make use of UK Postcodes to launch map or routefinder webpages.

But one thing keeps bugging me: how to write a bookmark, triggered by a Firefox Keyword, that will accept input from either the address line or from a user postcode selection on the web page currently being viewed.

This bookmarklet is not quite the solution I had in mind (it doesn't accept an argument from the address line) but it will offer a prompt for user input if text on the page isn't highlighted. However, it does have the advantage that it always works as a button on the bookmarklet toolbar. Here's the code:

javascript:

 tel=encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection());

 if(!tel) void(tel=prompt('Dialling Code: '));

 location.href='http://www.ukphoneinfo.com/cgi-bin-Phones/nng?GNG='+tel

In case you were wondering here's a postcode bookmarklet that takes a postcode as a user selection, or failing that, from a prompt, and finds the route to it from an embedded postcode using the Michelin routefinder.

javascript:

 pc=encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection());

 if (!pc) void(pc=prompt('Destination postcode: '));

 homePostCode='MK7 6AA';

 location.href='...//path to routefinder

 +'?reinit=1&strStartCP='+homePostCode+'&strDestCP='+pc

Del.icio.us tags: bookmarklet std postcode

Keyword Bookmarklets and Command Line Arguments

2005-04-03T11:35:00.000+01:00

I previously blogged about triggering Firefox bookmarklets form a keyword entered in the browser address line. What I didn'r record was how a command line argument could also be passed to a bookmarklet. This page on Keyword Bookmarklets for Scripters describes how the %s variable can be used to achieve this, so for example I can type directionsFromHomeTo MK76AA (not the shortest of keywords, admittedly!) and trigger a bookmark with my home postcode embedded in it that calls up a route finder from my home to MK76AA.

An example bookmarklet is here, essential bits of the code is as follows (you wouldhave to use whatever variable names the actual routefinder service requires, of course):

javascript:

 homePostCode='EH37QJ'; //for example...

 location.href= '...' //Routefinder URL here

 +'&fromPostCode='+homePostCode 

 +'&toPostCode=%s';

Del.icio.us tags: bookmarklet postcode

Routefinder Bookmarklet as a Firefox Keyword

2005-04-02T00:55:00.000+01:00

As this blog plays catch-up with notes I never made but possibly should have, here's a little bit of documentation to self about getting the most out of bookmarklets...

A few weeks ago, I posted a whole flurry of UK postcode related bookmarklets, that autodiscovered postcode <link /> tags or grabbed highlighted postcodes from a page, and launched postcode relevant pages, such as routefinders.

Now it's all very well having dozens and dozens of postcodes, but that doesn't make them useful if they're hard to find - the Bookmark toolbar is only so big , after all. This isn't a problem with Firefox, of course (not sure about IE? I don't use it any more...) - simply open up the bookmarklet's Properties dialogue, and enter a keyword (I started with fromwork, towork, fromhome and tohome, but these are likely to migrate to fw, tw, fh and th, as you might expect...). To fire the bookmarklet, I simply highlight a postcode on the page I'm viewing, enter the keyword in the Firefox address line, and a route from work (or wherever) to wherever appears as if by magic...

Del.icio.us tags: bookmarklet postcode

Networking the Networks with the Help of a FOAF..?

2005-04-01T21:24:00.000+01:00

One of the things I'm involved with that takes up more time than it probably should is RoboFesta-UK, an open network established to promote educational robotics for all ages and abilities and to promote the use of robotics related activities for STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) engagement. The motto of RoboFesta-UK, and the theme of the network's 2nd Annual Open Meeting in November 2002, is Networking the Networks. As well as administering RoboFesta-UK, the OU Robotics Outreach Group leads the Creative Robotics Research Network. This network is funded by the EPSRC, one of the UK's research councils, and is one of several research networks they fund in the UK.

One of the offerings that has generated some interest for the CRRN is the members' website carousel. Now, I happen to know that some members of the CRRN are members of other EPSRC robotics research networks. But in my experience, our shared interest networks do not necessarily work together as well as they should. Disseminating information between networks, for example, is often a hit or miss affair.

What would be useful, I think, would be to find a way to facilitate inter-netorking through groups or individuals are members of several newtorks. And I wonder of some sort of cut down version of the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project may be the way to go? Networking the Networks (NTN), perhaps?

So - where to start? The first step, I think, would be to reuse FOAF definitions where possible, but only insofar as is necessary - the NTN specification should start off as the smallest, yet still useful, subset of FOAF classes as possible.

So what's in a network? A loose affiliation of members? A smattering of projects? What NTN needs to capture, I think, are: 1) explicit affiliations of members to networks; 2) associations of projects with both networks and members. Some networks may spawn SIGs, or committees, which may also be worth representing - but perhaps these are just networks of their own, or at the the very least, subnetworks?

Quickly browsing the FOAF Vocabulary Specification, the following classes seem like they may be useful elements of NTN:

I. Group: "a collection of individual agents...This concept is intentionally quite broad, covering informal and ad-hoc groups, long-lived communities, organizational groups within a workplace, etc."

II. Project

III. Member: "a member of a Group".

Contact information for each class would be useful, as would funding information for Projects and Groups. The idea is not to recreate the complexity - and richer semantics - of FOAF. Simplicity is a key - with just enough information provided to allow member info records to stick together...

And what would the purpose of having this information autodiscovered from network members pages be? I'm working on that...

Del.icio.us tags: rdf ntn semanticweb

TinyTagURL via del.icio.us?

2005-03-29T17:59:00.000+01:00

Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tool Collection looks like a sensible place to go if you're looking for any del.icio.is tools (you may notice the toolbar link in this blog's sidebar...)

One thing that caught my eye was how a TinyURL is used to capture the link. (TinyURL was first pointed out to me as a comment to this post on shortening URLs, along with the more meaningful notlong.com.)

All well and good - but the meaninglessnes the TinyURL doesn't really endear it to me, though it admittedly much shorter than the URL it redirects to.

What would be far more useful, I think, would be to be able to create a meaningful shortcut. del.icio.us can actually get me quite close, as this link to my del.icio.us delicious tag shows, but it's still a neighbourhood search, rather than a one-to-one redirection link (this is an injective mapping, I think...the other, one-to-many case does not make much sense in terms of mathematical functions, although many-to-one mappings are more reasonable...).

What I'd really like is to be able to generate a del.icio.us.ly simple URI that somehow reflects the tag, or tags, I have used...this could perhaps be as simple as just adding a link number onto the end of the URI - e.g. http://del.icio.us/psychemedia/delicious#nn or http://del.icio.us/psychemedia/delicious/nn. The number (nn) is still arbitrary, but the rest of the URI is meaningful...and even without the actual link number (which may be set using a user preference, perhaps) still gets me close...

Del.icio.us Tags: tags delicious url

Who Rates This Page?

2005-03-23T19:18:00.000Z

As I pondered over several of the bookmarklets I have installed on the browser I use in the office, I realised how my idle-browsing habits are slowly starting to change as I augment my browser with 1-click search tools.

Consider these three bookmarklets, for example: On Technorati?, On del.icio.us?, Google links?. All of them return a search on the URL of the currently loaded page.

On Technorati? and Google links? both see who else has made mention of the page, On del.icio.us? sees who's bookmarked it.

As well as the links embedded in the page I'm looking at, I can also navigate away from it to pages related by backward links, such as you might expect from a Trackback service perhaps (here's a Trackback with Movable Type screencast if you're interested...). Alternatively, I can see who's rated the page enough to bookmark it on del.icio.us - I can then go through the list see how other people have clustered the page, for example through the tags they've used, and I can then go wandering through pages related to the one I was originally looking at through a similiarity measure based on a tag folksonomy.

OpenSearch Aggregator for Firefox?

2005-03-22T13:46:00.000Z

As the viral buzz catches hold of OpenSearch, I have to admit I am quite looking forward to the first OpenSearch Firefox extension that appears on the scene.

There are RSS aggregators already available for Firefox of course (such as Sage) but I think a personal metasearch aggregator would be a bit different...

For example, it may be useful to be able to set up personal search profiles that make queries to different sets of search engines.

To make administering personal search contexts a joy rather than a chore, my v0.1 client would support:

- easy definition of new search contexts;
- one click subscription to an OpenSearch feed;
- easy maintenance/editing of contexts and feeds.

The one click subscirption raises an interesting issue - does OpenSearch support autodiscovery that makes it clear an OpenSearch feed is available? Somehting like this perhaps:
<link rel="opensearch" type="application/rss+xml" href="http://safari.oreilly.com/osrss?search=" title="OpenSearch On Safari" />

Contention/prioritising results is an issue, of course, but I have some thoughts on that which I'll describe in a forthcoming post...

So Who's Open Searchable?

2005-03-21T11:05:00.000Z

It seems like the release of OpenSearch has appealed to a wide variety of people who run their own searches. Why? Presumably becuase it means that sites now have an easy way of federating their search results and participating in a flexible form of cross-searching.

You only have to look at the growing list of sites listed on A9.com > More Columns to sense that adoption of OpenSearch may be about to grow quickly. OpenSearch columns, by the way, refer to results 'columns' that are available on A9 - that is, they refer to search engines who have made themselves available to A9 through the OpenSearch protocol.

It will be interesting to see whether its lifecyle then follows the rest of the Gartner Hype Cycle:

It'll also be interesting to see how RSS aggregators evolve to provide customisable, personalised metasearch engines, in which the user subscribes to OpenSearch feeds of their own choosing and over time tunes the sites included to suit their own needs.

Del.icio.us tags: OpenSearch

JISCMAIL RSSFeeds

2005-03-18T08:20:00.000Z

JISCMAIL is a mailing list service sponsored by the JISC, for the UK Higher and Further Education communities, enabling members to stay in touch and share information by e-mail or via the web.

When you sign up to a list, the listserver can email you each message as it arrives at the server, or batch the mail in a digest on your behalf. The list server also takes care of archiving. I'm particularly keen on a couple of the mailing lists: Creative-robotics-network-info, the mailing list of the Creative Robotics Research Network (CRRN) and psci-com: on the public understanding of science.

Recently, however, I've been suffering an email crisis. I read an article on Managing Incoming E-mail: What Every User Needs to Know at the start of the year in an effort to be told again(!) about effective ways of managing ever increasing loads of email... but it's not working... I dread to think how many messages are in my Mailbox languishing unread and know I really should get round to adding some more filters, reducing the amount of lists I'm subscribed to, or finding another way of consuming the information that doesn't clutter up my space.

So - reading my JISCMAIL lists through an RSS aggregator seemed sensible...but I couldn't find any feeds there...so, here's one for the CRRN list, and here's one for PSCI-COM. The script needs tidying up, of course, but it's a start...

Del.icio.us tags: rss screenscraper

Playing With ISBNs...

2005-03-18T00:27:00.000Z

As with the plethora of services that make use of postcodes, some of which I have blogged about recently, there's also a wealth of services out there (not least the Amazon E-commerce Service) that take an ISBN as an argument.

What caught my eye with this posting - CIE Thoughts: An RSS feed for books? - about isbn.nu was the mention of the RSS output feed option... It's good to see that more people are making their search outputs machine readable...:-)

So for example, how about searching for a book by ISBN? (There's also a keyword search as you might expect...).

Some of my own doodles on using ISBNs can be found on the OUseful course book search page and the not quite ready yet Purchasers of this book may also be interested in studying... page.

Update:
Isbn.nu offer an RSS feed of new bools identified by keyword. For example, to keep track of new books on robotics, I subscibe to the http://isbn.nu/xmlsisbn/robotics RSS feed.

Del.icio.us tags: isbn search rss

del.icio.us Firefox Extension

2005-03-17T23:36:00.000Z

This nifty little Firefox extension adds a sidebar to your Firefox browser that gives you an overview of your del.icio.us tags, and the bookmarks associated with any particular highlighted tag.

For example:

Fot the record, I have started developing an as and when tutorial on web development using Firefox.

Del.icio.us tags: firefox delicious

Let's All Search Together - A9 OpenSearch

2005-03-17T17:04:00.000Z

OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication.

...and very pretty it is too. The idea is for search engines to have the option of returning their results in an extended form of RSS 2.0 referred to as OpenSearch RSS 1.0. To complement this is a standardised query language, OpenSearch Query Syntax 1.0.

The library sector have been thinking about generic queries for some time of course, (for example, check out this Symposium from 2003 on The Next Generation of Access: OpenURL and Metasearch). OpenURL consists of a BaseURL that points to a "link server" capable of resolving the link, plus a query string which contains bibliographic data expressed in a well-defined format [ref: here]

While sort of on the topic of OpenURL, the OpenURL/Google Scholar Firefox extension, made more usable here lets you look up responses from Google Scholar using your local academic library's link resolver... If that doesn't make any sense at all to you, here's an FAQ.

I did try once to get my local academic library to provide an RSS output feed from their Resources for Open University TEachers and Students (ROUTES)...(I offered this as proof of concept, though it's very ropey, doesn't escape special characters, doesn't necessarily give clean RSS etc)...but they preferred a bespoke XML format...

o hum - it will be interesting to see if they like OpenSearch RSS any better...

Bookmarking in del.icio.us

2005-03-15T23:33:00.000Z

Whilst watching a power user at play in the language evolution in del.icio.us screencast, I was intrigued to see how the optional extended element of a del.icio.us bookmark could be populated simply by highlighting a portion of text on the page to be bookmarked...

...but not it seems in the bookmarklet I got from deli.icio.us when I subscribed?

Never mind - the fix is a quick one: e.g. create a new variable:

r=encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection());

then add it to the URI used to open the bookmarking window:

+'&extended='+r

Del.icio.us Tags: bookmarklet delicious

Routefinder Bookmarklet

2005-03-15T20:02:00.000Z

Hopefully this is going to be the last of the recent thread of postcode/bookmarklet posts... Time for pastures new and all that... :-)

...so here we go - a bit of javascript something like the following:

javascript:
 homePostCode="EH37QJ";
 location.href= ''
   //targetURI including _from location (homePostCode)
  + encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection())
   //the _to location (or v.v)

Pop it into a link and we have the following bookmarklets:

- from myHomePostcode to selectedPostcode (Michelin Routefinder, or GreenFlag Routefinder)

- from selectedPostcode to myHomePostcode (Michelin Routefinder, or GreenFlag Routefinder)

To use the bookmarklets, drag them onto your browser toolbar, set the homePostCode bvariable to your home paostcode, then highlight a postcode (such as MK7 6AA) on an arbitrary webage. Fire off the appropriate bookmarklet to find the route between your home location and the highlighted target location...

Del.icio.us tags: bookmarklet postcode

User Selection Postcode Bookmarklets

2005-03-14T20:02:00.000Z

Although the use of <link /> elements can be readily exploited using bookmarklets, as the postcode <link /> shows, there are very few that are consistently used and as such even fewer that reach the critical density required to become self-sustaining in even tightly knit communities, let alone across the web as whole.

It therefore makes sense to provide bookmarklets that can feed of user highlighted text. This requires neither any commmitment on the part of the original page designer (no need to ensure the presence of the correct <link /> tag for example), nor sophisticated screen scraping routines to automatically identify information that is not necessarily explicitly marked up.

As an example, consider this description of a Postcode bookmarklet which straightforwardly opens a Multimap map depicting a postcode (such as MK7 6AA) highlghted in an arbitrary web page.

To borrow from that post, here's the
bookmarklet and

javascript:
  location.href='http://uk.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?pc='+
  encodeURIComponent(window.getSelection())

As before, it's easy enough to provide a wealth of related bookmarklets, like this
UpMyStreet bookmarklet or this
UK Postcode to Grid Co-ordinates Bookmarklet.

To use any of these bookmarklets, just drag them onto your browser toolbar, highlight a UK postcode on any webpage, and fire off the bookmarklet...

Del.icio.us Tags: bookmarklet postcode

Bookmarklets, Form POST Data and More Postcode Info...

2005-03-14T11:43:00.000Z

One thing that has been nagging me about bookmarklets has been how to use them to pass information to a webpage/service tht accepts form POST data.

Easy enough with a GET, of course, you just add the variable name and the required data to the URI. But for services like this list of bus/coach services which only accept FORM data, I was stumped as to how to do it...

...until someone suggested making a form... a quick search later, and this page on Smart Bookmarks and Bookmarklets showed the way forward...

My first attempt pulled the postcode <link /> info from a page and then tried to create a new document to hold the form...but that seemed to hang, so now the change is made to the loaded page directly... Naughty, I know, but there we go - if you can show me how to get a working bookmarklet that creates the form in a new document, please add a comment...

So, for the record, this is the script:

javascript:void(d=document);
 void(el=d.getElementsByTagName('link'));
 for(i=0;i<el.length;i++){
  if(el[i].getAttribute('rel').indexOf('postcode')!= -1){
   uri='http://www.carlberry.co.uk/rfnlistl.asp';
   f=d.createElement('form');
   f.method ='post';
   f.action=uri;
   i0=d.createElement('input');
   i0.type='text';
   i0.name='IL5';i0.value=foaf;
   f.appendChild(i0);
   d.body.appendChild(f);
   f.submit();
  };
 };

and this is the bus timetable bookmarklet.

If you want to give it a try, this whole blog is postcode <link /> enabled...

Del.ici.ous tags: bookmarklet

Web Page Plus: UK Postcodes

2005-03-13T21:28:00.000Z

A couple of days ago, I blogged about a postcode <link />, implicitly hinting that it might lead to some interesting Web Page Plus functionality through bookmarklets and Firefox extensions...

To move this on a bit, it seems sensible to provide a bookmarklet generator to support the easy creation of links into an arbitrary postcode service... And when I get a chance, that's exactly what I'll do...

Of course, if pages don't include something like <link rel="postcode" type="text/html" title="mk7 6AA" /> the bookmarklets won't be of much use, at least until I work out how to build a Firefox Extension that will let me use reg-exp identified postcodes in an arbitrary page (I know, I know, the ethics of rewriting other people's pages in your browser may or may not be a good thing... see The Google Autolink Debate for a recap).

Anyway, to be going on with, there are a couple more demo bookmarklets... Last time, I demonstrated the postcode <link /> with this
UK Postcode Map Bookmarklet. It's easy enough to tweak this code to access other services by changing a single argument, so here are a few derived bookmarklets...

- UK UpMyStreet Bookmarklet

- UK Postcode to Grid Co-ordinates Bookmarklet

If you customise your bookmarklet with a 'home' variable setting, then it's straightforward to bookmarklet "arity 2" postcode related webpages... You can imagine using this to bookmarklet a route finding service between your home, say, and a postcode <link />ed page, such as these two:

- Michelin Routefinder Bookmarklet

- Green Flag Routefinder Bookmarklet

Del.ici.ous tags: bookmarklet postcode

seamlessUK - Interoperable e-government?

2005-03-10T22:39:00.000Z

The seamlessUK website claims to allow citizens the chance to "retrieve information from multiple websites and databases in a single search without the need to know, or enter the specific addresses for each one" via Z39.50 (which I've heard of...) and Z'mbol, which I haven't, though it appears to be something that sits on top of Z39.50, so that's okay then...

XML and SOAP is mentioned in the mix, but any really useful details appear (at the moment at least) to be sadly lacking...

Now, Z39.50 isn't really my area (is anything?) and though I thought I'd blogged about it before, it appears I haven't...

So, as far as my limited understanding goes, I though Z39.50 was old and boring, and XML was to be the way forward with SRW. This reasonably recent post on a Web Services Approach for Search and Retrieve seems to introduce some of the issues (there are a few more links on this earlier posting about SRW, where I suggested that the SOAP/REST debate is going on in the library world using different acronyms...)

Anyway - back to seamlessuk and another quote: "[t]he seamlessUK geocoder will search a number of geographic data sources to resolve place name queries, understand what the user has entered and interpret that query for the different information sources." Good, eh?

Now what gets me is that the taxonomy underlying this system (because you have to have a taxonomy, right?, or ontology, or whatever translator glue you want to call it) is licensable... and there doesn;t appear - at the moment at least - to be an open interface to the system. Which is gonna make it hard for people to embed in their own systems, presumably...so they either won't bother, or they'll build their own...or perhaps they won't...we'll see...

Autodiscovery and Location Aware Web Pages

2005-03-10T21:35:00.000Z

Autodiscovery describes the way in which machine readable metadata can be extracted - and exploited - from a webpage. The key to it all is the humble <link /> tag, though when the spec. was written things like RSS/Atom autodiscovery were presumably as yet unimagined...

...and so it came to pass that autodiscovery came to prominence with the rise of the blogs, as this early blog posting suggested it might, and this posting shows how it has come to do so...

Autodiscovery is not just limited to RSS/Atom though. FOAF Autodiscovery aims to promote the development of Friend of a Friend (FOAF) social networks by making FOAF records machine discoverable/readable.

The development of web technologies thrives on reuse - and tools that make reuse easy. If you want to generate a bookmarklet to assist you with autodiscovery from a <link /> tag, try this autodiscovery bookmarklet generator. With almost no effort, you can generate a bookmarklet that learn something from a suitably <link /> augmented page...

...which is where the Location Aware Webpage comes in...

The prototype is very, very simple... add a link tag to the head of the page containing the postcode of where I'm at:

<link rel="postcode" type="text/html" title="mk7 6AA" />

(In the US, this would be a zip code, of course...but this is just the first prototype, remember...)

Now for UK Postcode Map bookmarklet straight out of the generator:

javascript:void(d=document);
 void(el=d.getElementsByTagName('link'));
 for(i=0;i<el.length;i++){
  if(el[i].getAttribute('rel').indexOf('postcode')!= -1){
   var newlocation='http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/postcode/';
   var foaf=el[i].getAttribute('title');
   void(location.href=newlocation+foaf)
  };
 };

This code makes reuse of the http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/postcode/ redirector, which takes a UK postcode as a final argument and redirects it, with suitable GET sugar coating, to Multimap.

So, to see what happens, grab the bookmarklet, place it on your toolbar, then (as long as this page at least is loaded) try it out...hopefully, you'll see where I'm at as I write this page...

So, where next?

A zip code equivalent for the US, a Firefox plugin so there's a little button, like the RSS subscribe button down in the bottom right hand corner, to launch the autodiscovery location map plotter, a user dialogie to choose your locale (and hence your map plotter) and so on...

Any volunteers? ;-)

Building Social Networks: FOAF and XFN...

2005-03-09T13:19:00.000Z

XFN (XHTML Friends Network) and FOAF (Friend Of A Friend) are social networking protocols intended to identify links and relationships between people in a machine readable way.

This comparison of XFN and FOAF (on the XFN site, so maybe there's just a teensy weensy bit of bias, even if it is written by Eric A. Meyer) suggests that XFN offers a far more lightweght approach to the RDF overkill of FOAF. That's not necessaily a good thing, though, as some bloggers have a real problem with it: What does XFN to offer, then, exactly?). For the most considered view I have founfd to date, there's this response to Meyers comparison. However, having only just come across both of these schemes, I shall refrain from judgment until I've had a chance to play with both of them...

On the face of it, though, FOAF seems a better bet. And if there are occasionally useful XFN links out there, the something like this XSLT XHTML/XFN2RDF/FOAF converter seems sensible...

Capturing Personal Network Relationships

2005-03-09T12:59:00.000Z

Working from a variety of desktop and laptop machines, file, contact, bookmark etc. management can be a real problem if you aren't very discplined as to where you put stuff! Portable data storage is okay for some things, network/web storage for others. So what I'm trying to do is train myself to use web-based facilities, and then glue them together with whatever protocols and XSLT's I can.

Okay, okay, so how off the ball am I? Having only just discovered the del.icio.us social bookmarks manager, I'm keen to explore what is has to offer in terms of bookmark sharing and management. Support for clickable descriptor tags ("one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark"), user-defined views over bookmarks, and the all important REST api suggests the need for some serious play over the next few days...

PocketThis: Why Should I pay for the Privilege?

2005-03-04T18:05:00.000Z

PocketThis :: Partners Portfolio has several "See how it works" demos of their service. Find the "Pocket This" link on a web page, and get the nuggets of information shown there (travel times, for instance, or classified ad details) sent top your mobile.

All well and good - but you pay for the privilege. Now this is one of those old 'who should pay?' chestnuts, but in this case it may well be that I will use the info pocketed from a company's webpage to make a purchase from that company. In which case, I definitely do NOT want to pay...especially of those self-same companies send me junk txts...

I much prefer the affitilate idea where I get txts for free from a 3rd party, such as my old favourite Txtbux, and they hope i may a purchase that they can claim an affiliate fee from. Of course, txtbux does require registration, which is a big spoiler...

So perhaps there should be a compromise... The current no registration model, where I pay to recieve a txt; or a new model, where I register with Pocket This and get txts for free. If I make a purchase as a result, quoting a code that tracks back to Pocket This, they get a fee, I get a free txt, the company trying to sell me something pays...

Where Am I?

2005-03-04T17:50:00.000Z

Mobile Commerce, a UK company specialising in content for mobile and location aware clients, describe a Location Gateway that provides location awareness for the four major UK networks (which are unstated...).

For more information, it's worth skimming through their Location Gateway FAQ.

Affiliate Me With Google Toolbar's AutoLink

2005-02-28T10:14:00.000Z

The relesae of the new Google Toolbar v3 in Beta has caused a widespread level of debate around the new Autolink feature that allows users to click a Google toolbar button and convert ISBN numbers (among other things) into links (Google Toolbar's AutoLink & The Need For Opt-Out gives an insight into some of the reasons why people think this is a bad idea...).

In the Beta, the ISBN links are to Amazon, although it's likely that users will be able to tune this in the final release. I can see why many webmasters will feel uncomfortable with this ability for Google to effectively rewrite pages, and this forms one of the major arguments in favour of allowing webmasters to opt-out. But then, Firefox extension coders revel in developing such tools which can, in many cases, provide a useful service.

At the risk of upsetting everybody, Google could always allow either webmasters to embed their preferred book reseller and affiliate code in page headers, so that IF the Google Addlink is used, the original site at least has some influence where the link goes, unless ovwerridden buy the user, who should also have the same freedom. This suggests a default hierarchy where user prefernces over-ride site preferneces, which in turn over-ride Google's defaults.

It would also be nice if as well as pointing to booksellers, the toolbar could be configured to take users to their local library... I'm thinking of a service like Jon Udell's LibraryLookup tool, of course...

Not Quite Useable - Txting London's Blue Plaques

2005-02-27T22:22:00.000Z

The seemingly unmaintained HandHeld History website - a joint venture between English Heritage and tech aware historiy freaks, apparently - tells you how to go about using your mobile to find out just a little bit more about the lives of the famous people who's homes, birthplaces, or occasional overnight resting places are immortalised by blue plaques.

If you txta message to 82222 starting with hhh and followed by one of the codes listed on the Blue Plaques SMS codes page, you'll get an informative txt back about the person named on the plaque. The codes are generated from the initial and suname indicated on the plaque, mostly - but there are exceptions, which is where this service falls down I think...

How much better if there wre a unique code on all the plaques?

The slightly premium rate Blue Plaques story codes service (which gives you an audio description) uses an 8 digit code made up of the year of birth and the year of death detailed on the plaque.

Given the number of plaques around the country, I can quite imagine that these numbers are not unique - but this numerical code is more reliable than the txt key, I think, if it is to be generated by your average punter (assuming all the plaques carry at east one date, and you know the rule to repeat the date if only one is shown). In cases of duplication, you might be informed of the two or more possibilities relating to Plaques sharing a key and asked to reply with your choice of which Plaque you'd like to know more about (and the hhh people may find that punters then go on to request info about the alternatives that shared bith and death dates - for an extra paid for message, of course!)

Micro-Info Radio: Traffic Info (and music downloads?)

2005-02-24T18:46:00.000Z

Catching up with myself again, as the notion of micro-information services as short self-describing, auto-discovery and/or standards based short messaging protocols develops, here's a bit of background information on RDS Radio Data System.

(If you've never really got you head round the PTY and TA buttons on your car radio, the BBC produce this useful RDS cribsheet).

Digital radio also supports digital radio text services, of course, which can similarly provide information about current tracks, or artist information.

Of course, in my integrated radio/mobile phone/iPod in-car entertainment system, I'd have a single button that made use of the artist info and track identifier to pop a download of the song currently playing onto my iPod, and all for the price of a premium rate data call....

Traffic and travel information has traditionally been one of the drivers, though, of RDS uptake, and this area of information provision is only likely to become more widespread as location awareness becomes cheaper to support. This quitew elderly article on the provision of traffic and travel information services rehearses some of the arguments that have presumably informed the development of current TTI services.

It may (or may not....) be worth noting that TTI services seem to be quite an active area of international standards development (TC204 Intelligent transport systems).

I guess while I'm on the subject of traffic information, it's probably worth putting in a pointer to Transport Protocol Experts Group (TPEG), a protocol that has been developed to enable the broadcast of Traffic and Travel information by DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) radio broadcast. A slightly more accessible overview of the standard is available here, but you'd still have to be really keen to look through it!

Location Aware Txt Alert Bookcrossing?

2005-02-21T12:38:00.000Z

BookCrossing is oh so simple an idea that can be used to pass on a book (possibly) to someone who really wants to read it. Leave your book in a particular location, register it on the Bookcrossing site, and posssibly, possibly it will go to a good home.

The site supports alerts - so you can get an email if someone leaves a book in your area - but this is only useful if you have access to your email. It would be more convenient, perhapsm to get the alert to your mobile...

But who'd pay? There are plenty of sites on the web that allow you to buy some txt credit and then use it to send txts from the web, so if you trust Bookcrossing enough to allow it to send you txts via your account a solution presents itself. If you live in a popular Bookcrossing area, though, the txts may get expensive, so filters would be useful (e.g. to notify you of books on your booklist that have been left in your vicinity).

Two additional sorts of automation would also be possible

- using Amazon's similar items webservice, you can cast the net wider than your booklist, but still related to it;

- using location awareness (based on the location of your mobile) to set your current location preference on the Bookcrossing site.

A few projects there for a slow weekend, perhaps...

Where's That Mobile?

2005-02-20T21:11:00.000Z

Although an asynchronous service, SMS has the potential to support one-way and two-way interactions based on the limited form of location awareness you potentially get for free every time you switch your mobile phone on.

Here's one brief review of Location and Presence in Mobile Data Services that sets the scene admirably.

One obvious question is - what sorts of location aware services are already out there making use of this information?

mapAmobile is one idea that raised quite a few privacy concerns when it was first released. Using the mapAmobile service, you can get your current location txted to your phone (send try mapamobile to 83118 (in the UK) and (allegedly) they'll send you details of your location by return txt. I'm not sure how many trials this is good for, though!). Once registered, you can look up the location of a phone registered with your account through a browser.

ChildLocate does something similar, and rather than going for the corposrate market, this service is targeted squarely at families.

Hmmm - seems like another blogger was been surfing similar things this time last year: One Stop Thought Shop: Little Brother is watching!. TagandScan looks weel worth a play here in the UK...it might not be too hard to build a simialr service from scratch using the location awareness service that comes with an iTAGG account.

Styling it Nicely...

2005-02-18T15:07:00.000Z

Separating presentation from content is one of the bedrocks of current web standards. A great plus of this approach is that it becomes relatively easy to rip the look of another of site you particularly like the style of, and apply it to your own pages.

For a quick idea of what you can do to fixed content with a variety of style sheets, the css Zen Garden does, as its strap line suggests, demonstrate the Beauty in CSS Design.

Alternatively, the Blogger Templates blog shows just what you can do to a Blogger blog like this one with just a little bit of imagination...

If you're interested in customising pages yourself, it helps if you have a little knowledge of CSS... HTML Dog is as good as any place to start, with its clean design and useful blogs...

Generative Naming

2005-02-18T13:21:00.000Z

If you can work out how a developer has structured the URI hierarchy of their site, you're well on the way to being able to URl hack it to find the stuff you want locate without having to do much browsing.

If a site is built on Generative Naming principles, and you have a model of those principles (or it is published for all to see) then as a user you can build all sorts of tools that exploit this principled naming convention.

There is a danger here, though, that the URIs are being used to transmit information they shouldn't. For example, the MIME-TYPE of a representation should be used to classify what sort of a representation it is (HTML document, pdf or png file, for example) rather than the document suffix. That is, we allow for the URI to be misleading - which is what generative, semantically useful naming confounds to a certain extent.

But as a shortcut, where the structure of generative URIs maps cleanly onto links and relationships between resources, we have a way of navigating from memory or rule. The Naming Isn't Navigating post considers this point, too.

You may note that both the above links point to pages on the RESTwiki... it's well worth a look, I think....

Firefox Search Toolbars

2005-02-16T23:02:00.000Z

The number of Firefox toolbars available seems to be increasing day by day...

Steve Anthony's Universe offers several catalogue additions to the Firefox searchbox (such as the Canadian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) catalogue, and ScienceDirect). He also offers a CISTI Sidebar that builds on Peter Binley's Google Scholar/OpenURL extension.

The Science Library Pad: Firefox extensions blog has regular postings about new search tool additions to Firefox.

Shortening URLs

2005-02-16T13:19:00.000Z

The DigBig - Long URLs shortened service lets you map long (often meaningless) URLs (such as deep links) to shorter equivalents that (unfortunately) are also meaningless...

The DigBig info page offers an example of a long URL into a multimap map for a particular postcode -

"This long URL (152 characters) ...
http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi
?client=public&db=pc&addr1=&client=pub
lic&addr2=&advanced=&addr3=&pc=SW1A1AA
&quicksearch=SW1A+1AA&cidr_client=none
... is shortened to just 22 characters ...
http://digbig.com/3bbd"

How much more useful if I could also map that onto a sensible string, such as the following, for instance:
digbig.com//SW1A1AA
or possibly
digbig.com//postcodeMap/SW1A1AA
or
digbig.com//maps/westminster
or something a bit more intuitive....I personally don't think I can remember many more random 4 character strings!

The path would let me build up my own list of short (ish!) meaningful URLs, a bit like at ouseful.open.ac.uk/

New Ways of Communicating with Digital Library Users

2005-02-16T11:22:00.000Z

Project Bluebird: notifications research at Talis is an ongoing umbrella project that is exploring how new technologies can be used to improve the ways in which academic and public lending libraries communicate with their users. There aren't many details on the Project Bluebird site yet (though there is this basic white paper on libraries and RSS), but it's probably worth keeping tabs on (now why don't they have an RSS feed about this project...?)

Here's something to be wary of on older sites, though - RSS in a library context is not necessarily to do with the sort of XML feed you may expect your blog to produce. It also stands for (or at least stood until recently for) Resources Sharing System, a "protocol-based automation system that managed borrowing and lending requests." It has since been renamed by its developers (if the site redirect is anything to go by) to
Universal Resource Sharing Application (URSA).

Anyway (and here's one I think I may have blogged before) for a quite wideranging peek at the way various libraries are using RSS feeds, have a look at RSS(sm): Rich Site Services. Blogs, news and what's new appear to be the mainstays.

And finally, I've seen online bank account consolidators before, but a library account consolidator is new to me. Still, the ELF Personal Email Library Reminder Service seems eminently sensible...

Give Web Services a REST...

2005-02-16T11:13:00.000Z

A reasonable piece in IEEE Distributed Systems online: Critics Say Web Services Need a REST

Mobile Information Services

2005-02-15T21:45:00.000Z

I've not been keeping tabs on what's been happening in the world of mobile information services (and in particular asynchronous, SMS services) for a bit, so let's see what's happenign at the old haunts...

Portalify seem to be slowly pushing out their Library applications, and their Coinlet mobile payment system.

Mobile ticketing seems a sensible application - I wonder if a crude derivative of this approach could be used to take payment for tea and biscuits and suchlike from charity stalls - send a message ("charitygift cup of tea") to a premium. 50p a shot number, and get a receipt back: "Thank you for donating 50p to /whatever charity/ for your cup of tea"! No more need for loose change - just post the quicktext number and keyword and let the txt take the payment. Show the receipt msg and collect your cuppa!

This looks like it may be worth exploring - text.it, which is apparently "the only official website dedicated to text messaging in the UK".

Now here's a thought (though possibly little more than that) - mGovernment: Mobile/Wireless Applications in Government. Using mobiles to co-ordinate activist activities (?!) is probably more likely: An Introduction to Activism on the Internet: Cell Phones

What Lies Beneath - What HTTP Offers REST

2005-02-12T22:27:00.000Z

Advocates of the RESTful approach to webservices argue that HTTP provides all the verbs necessary for managing the transfer of representations via the web.

GET, POST, PUT and DELETE seem to map well on to the Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete (CRUD) primitives familiar in the world of databases.
If we take a view of the web as a medium across which we can access representations from some sort of universally addressable distributed database, then being able to map from GPPD to CRUD would seem like a useful place to start. Just how well these two do map will be left for a later posting.

If you had a look at the HTTP specification linked to from the W3C link above, you may still be none the wiser (in lay terms) about the differences between GET and POST in particular. (These are the two most widely used verbs, as you'll know if you've every created an HTML form). So, as far as the GET and POST methods go, what's the difference?

Txt Price Info

2005-02-12T20:08:00.000Z

An old link - online book prices to your mobile phone by SMS - and a new one (to me, at least) - Car Prices by SMS.

The first one's free, the second one is pricey. Both work on a similar principle, though. Send a keyword and a unique identifier (ISBN in the case of txtbux, car registration number(!) and estimated mileage in the Car Prices case) and get a text message back with some useful price info - an Amazon book price on the one hand, car dealer list prices on the other.

Another SMS service I use regularly is the registration free SMS To email. Just start your txt msg with an email address, and it'll do the rest...

A Time Before the SOAP vs. REST - SOAP vs. XML-RPC

2005-02-12T19:18:00.000Z

With the ongoing debate about the pros and cons of SOAP as compared to REST, the scholar in me got to thinking about the last round of debate between XML-RPC vs. SOAP. (Funny as it seems now, think the first time I came across REST was this article on Creating and Consuming Web Services With PHP - REST was mentioned as a final footnote...).

In particular, it seems that no-one's much interested in arguing around XML-RPC now, although a three-way comparison does occasionally turn up, like in this consideration of Consuming Web services in PHP.

This is possibly useful and/or interesting. What is it about XML-RPC that makes it no longer a topic of interest? Has REST taken over one of the lines of argument, or have some of the arguments in favour of XML-RPC lost out to SOAP? I seem to remember that the old Amazon webservice API gave examples for SOAP, XML-RPC and then later on for REST, but their new ECS API focusses on REST and SOAP (I think...)

SOAP'n'REST, cf. SRW'n'SRU

2005-02-08T23:52:00.000Z

The webservice developer community has for some time been debating the relative strengths and weakness of SOAP based webservices compared to the REST approach (see the article Roots of the REST/SOAP Debate for one of many discussions on this topic, or alternatively this useful blog: SOAP vs. REST. This Second Generation Web Services article is also a useful starting point, along with the follow up article on REST and the Real World.

There also seems to be an almost parallel debating going on in the digital library world, (though lagging the SOAP vs. REST debate perhaps?), as described in Search and Retrieval in The European Library.

The two challengers represent different approaches to online search and retrival. In one corner, the SOAP contender is Search and Retrieve via the Web (SRW) and in the other the Search and Retrieve URL Service (SRU)

Developers are mindful of both approaches, though, as the OCLC Online Computer Library Center demonstrates...

Wot No URLs? When GET and POST intervene...

2005-02-08T00:30:00.000Z

The increasing number of database driven websites means that in some cases a naive URL hack doesn't work... welcome to The Deep Web

The address may still be hackable of course, especially if you're looking at a library, say, where they may have opted into OpenURL, (and here's more than you need to know).

Where forms are used to generate search terms that at GET or POSTED to the server where it can make secretive database queries to its heart's content, you can always poke around the form's source code and work out what search terms you need. If you have access to server side rewrites and redirects, you can quite easily make a short, convenient alias to an otherwise bleurggghhhhy URl like this, perhaps?

How should I address my pages?

2005-02-08T00:20:00.000Z

The previous posting about URL/address line hacking got me thinking about what protocols - informal or otherwise - influence the structure of websites and often as a result (server side rewrites aside) the most commonly used addressing schemes.

Here's what some of those folks at W3C think: Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don't change.

URL hacking

2005-02-08T00:11:00.000Z

Sometimes its the only way...you know the info's there somehwere, but the onscreen site navigation is lacking...so what can you do but attack the address line directly?

If the site is organised in a sensible way, you can often get quite a long way just by making up a sensible path... take UK universiies for example. Sometimes the easiest way of finding a person (if you know their department) is to look up the department's homepage and stick people/ on the end. for example, the York computer science departmental website lives at http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/, so i reckon http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/people/ is a good bet for the staff listing...

So what does a quick Google trawl of url hacking turn-up? Hacking the URL: Do-It-Yourself Navigation Library hacks which naturally leads to the yet to flourish Library-hacks Wiki

This one I knew about from xml.com: Hacking the Library, which mentions a British Library experimental webservice, but doesn't yet give the location of it... If you're intereste, the address just happens to be http://herbie.bl.uk:9080/

OpenURL Firefox Extension

2005-02-07T23:23:00.000Z

Peter Binkley's Google Scholar OpenURLs Firefox Extension added a tool that would allow users to retrieve the full text (wherever possible) of articles listed as search results in Google Scholar from their own academic library. The only problem was that the user themselves had to poke around around in the innards of the extension to set up a link to their own library's resolver....However, there is derived version of this extension now available that allows the user to set the resolver address throug a straightforawrd dialogue: Openly's OpenURL Referrer

Amazon Catalogue Includes Website Links...

2004-09-29T08:00:00.000+01:00

Now why would amazon be getting into this? Amazon.com: website info: The Open University

CRM here, CRM There - So What is CRM?

2004-08-09T22:04:00.000+01:00

I need some sort of definition... What Is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?. So where's it used then? CRM in the call center and contact center, perhaps, or how about a CRM needs that data-mining?

A Sensible SMS Service, for twice...

2004-07-01T02:06:00.000+01:00

Another Kizoom service, I think - a journey planner for use in Central London: Transport for London - Journey Planner - Home. There's also an SMS based service: TfL Text messaging services.

A Sensible SMS Service, for once...

2004-07-01T02:01:00.000+01:00

A company that specialises in providing mobile info related to transport: Kizoom. Among other things, they support the txting of info from the UK national rail timetable site: http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/planmyjourney.

Mobile/SMS Services

2004-06-29T10:27:00.000+01:00

The following seems like a good place to get an overview of mobile services that are currently available....LogicaCMG Mobile services.

Developments in the XML route may be worth looking at every couple of months or so...- Using XML to send SMS messages.

Combining XML Documents

2004-06-23T00:13:00.000+01:00

Trying to cobble together a set of multiple XML docs that together make up separate sections of a chapter into a single <chapter/> element is raising several interesting issues - e.g. how to cope with explicitly coded section numbers (which really should be generated automatically...Trying to do all the processing in xslt, rather than PHP say, means what I really need is regular expressions - and it seems that xslt 2.0 can offer this: XML.com: Regular Expression Matching in XSLT 2