tag page 10 - Dave's Blog

Bunny Weekend

2007 Apr 8, 3:46This weekend was fun. Sarah and I went out for Jane's Birthday. We ate at a little Italian restaurant where our group was almost too large for the place and afterwards went to the Viceroy lounge. The website apparently isn't very representative because although I looked at it before going out and I'd been to the place previously, I didn't realize it was the same location until we got there.

I got several games for my Wii through Sarah's connections including Wii Play and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. We played both of them and I thought Find Mii was especially fun.

Sarah's bunny is getting pretty big. Its been biting through wires now includig part way through the power cord to the cable box. You'd think after getting to the copper that it would learn to stop. At any rate, it didn't hide any eggs. I don't have any new photos but you can see the old bunny photos via my Vizicious tool.personal nontechnical seatle wii

Delicious shortcut tag

2007 Apr 8, 3:05Shortcut Tag?
I just saw this on another user's delicious links: a link to ESV search that's tagged with, among other things, "shortcut:esv". When viewed on del.icio.us there's a text box that lets you search using that link. I hadn't seen this before, but it seems pretty cool and I'm surprised I hadn't seen it previously. A delicious post with such a tag ends up looking like the following: I tried searching for information on this and I've found other delicious users doing the same thing, but nothing about the tag itself. If you know any information especially official information from del.icio.us itself please post links in reply to this post. So without further preface here's what I've learned about the del.icio.us shortcut tag.

How-to
To get a search box in your del.icio.us links make a post that satisfies the following requirements:

1. One of the tags must begin with the text 'shortcut:'. You can have more text following that in the tag if you like but it must at least start with 'shortcut:'.
2. The 'url' you post must be a shortcut url rather than an actual URL. It must contain a '%s' with a lowercase 's'. When you enter text into the textbox on the del.icio.us page the text will replace the '%s' after being percent-encoded. For example 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s' is the shortcut url for Google and if you type 'foo bar' into the textbox the URI you will navigate to would be 'http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foo%20bar'.

Complaints
This is neat but I do have a few complaints:

1. The text from the textbox is percent-encoded before replacing the '%s'. Most sites use application/x-www-form-urlencoded which encodes spaces as '+' rather than '%20'.
2. The shortcut url format seems to be taken from Mozilla's Firefox Custom Keywords. Its a shame it wasn't based on something more adaptable like the OpenSearch URL template syntax.
3. A '%s' in the url means technically what you're submitting to del.icio.us isn't a URI as defined by the standard.
4. Allowing text after 'shortcut:' means you can't look at all of a user's shortcut using this tag.

The next step is to create a tool to sync my IE7 search providers with my shortcuts saved to delicious...technical howto tagging tool tag delicious

Vizicious Update

2007 Mar 14, 12:44I've been working on a personal project Vizicious. Vizicious displays a graph of your delicious links or (this is the new part) your flickr photos.

I had this previously on my old website but I've rewritten it and separated out the presentation portion from the part that does all the real work. This means its alot easier for me to incorporate new kinds of input (like flickr feeds).

Anyway, if you're not interested in the details just click here to see my photos tagged 'france' run through Vizicious.vizicious technical homepage

Weekend Humor

2007 Mar 13, 8:16Over the weekend I went with Jon and Sarah to see Zach Galifianakis perform at The Moore who was awesome of course. I hadn't been to The Moore before but it was very cool. The space is very vertical with two levels of balconies making it seem small in the other dimensions. We were on the middle level so when Zach climbed off the stage to talk to the audience we couldn't see him.

Before the show we ate at The Steelhead Diner. I enjoyed my chicken sandwhich but the place seemed a little full of itself with salt and pepper that had been infused with this and that. At any rate it had a nice atmosphere and good food which I suppose is the point.

The opening act for Zach was another comedian whose name I don't recall. He was pretty funny but seemed to do just a tad too much pandering to the Seattle audience. "The administration should do something different than what they're doing currently!" *Audience Cheers* is sort of equivalent to "Its great to be here in... Seattle!" *Audience Cheers*.personal seattle nontechnical