delicious page 3 - Dave's Blog

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

Moved to Server-Side Scripting

2007 Jan 19, 9:15I've moved my homepage to server-side scripting. Previously I've mentioned that I was using client side scripting to interpret and sort my livejournal and delicious entries together. Now I'm using PHP and XSLTs to process and sort my livejournal, delicious, flickr, and librarything entries. See my homepage for the finished result.
LibraryThing is pretty cool despite being pretty niche. Its like flickr but for books. I display a random sampling of the covers of books I have listed in librarything on my page. I've also hooked the display of the covers of my book up to the corner image. Now when you hover over the cover of a book a bigger picture of its cover appears in the corner of the webpage. Also, flickr entries in the main section how have the same on hover behavior.
This may not be the best use of my time, but its still fun.librarything xslt delicious homepage flickr technical php livejournal script

My New IE Blog Entry

2006 Dec 6, 6:18I got another blog entry on the IE Blog! I wrote about file URIs in IE. Lots of fun right? Woo for file URIs! I added the post to del.icio.us and saw that it had already been added 6 times previous. This compared to my previous IE Blog post which was added to del.icio.us a total of 1 time(s) by y.t. I guess people are more interested in blog posts that have 'URI' in the title than they are about blog posts whose title references Dijkstra. Coming soon (or later) to the IE Blog: a post on international mailto URIs. Hooray!blog ie7 file uri delicious

Cool New Thing

2006 Nov 3, 3:02I'm updating my homepage to include a sorted list of my livejournal blog entries and my del.icio.us bookmarks. I'm using BadgerFish to convert the XML of the RSS feeds of the two into JavaScript objects. At that point I can do fun stuff like sorting them into lists on my page. Neat. This is how I spend my free time... OK.xml badgerfish feed rss script livejournal delicious homepage