technica page 41 - 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

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

OpenID Stolen Thoughts

2007 Mar 13, 7:57I had a few thoughts after reading about OpenID. However, after doing only a very small amount of digging I can see these aren't new thoughts.

Anonymous OpenID

Have an OpenID that anyone can use because it performs no authorization. You'd specify a URI like http://deletethis.net/anonymousopenid/yournamehere and you'd immediately get an anonymous OpenID associated with that URI. This has already been implemented by Jayant Gandhi.

Group OpenID

Have an OpenID that consists of a group of member OpenIDs. To login as the Group OpenID you need to login with any of the member OpenIDs. This is discussed more by Dmitry Shechtman on his blog.

OpenID Normalization

I find that I already have a couple of OpenIDs without even trying due to AOL giving out OpenIDs. I'd like for all of my OpenIDs to point to one canonical OpenID. It looks like this may already be possible by the OpenID specification.

I guess I'm a little late to the scene.technical stolen-thoughts openid

Live Bookmarks for IE7!

2007 Jan 24, 5:32My new extension for IE7 named Feed Folder is now (more) available. Feed Folder is like Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature. You can view your subscribed IE7 feeds as a folder containing shortcuts to each of the feed's items. If you've got Windows XP and you like Feeds then use my extension with IE7. Do it now!feed-folder feed live-bookmarks ie7 technical project atom rss extension

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

Post-School Plans

2004 Apr 22, 3:52I actually have something to say which I thought would be appropriate for the LiveJournal format. Why I haven't posted to the LiveJournal for such a great length of time can be saved for later. I spent Easter weekend and the Monday following, in Washington, the state. Microsoft paid for me to fly up and stay in Washington so I could do the technical portion of the interview with them. I hung out with my friend Jeannie and she showed me all around Seattle on Saturday and Sunday. Each night we had somewhat expensive dinners, all paid for by Microsoft. It was cool. On Sunday I stayed at a nice hotel in Redmond and the next morning I spent just short of eight hours being interviewed by five different people from different groups within Microsoft. Each sub interview consisted of two portions. First there was the general portion where they would ask me why I wanted to work there, ask about my previous experience, and those sort of non technical questions. The second portion would take the majority of the time and it would be me trying to solve some technical problem they'd present. By the end of the interview my hands were gray with dry erase marker ink because apparently everybody's got a whiteboard and they all want me to write code on them. I have to go to class soon and I might post some more stories related to this trip, but mostly I wanted to say that last week I received a great offer from them and I'll probably be moving up to Washington sometime (weeks or months?) after graduation. Also, I've changed my AIM name from SequelGuy to SequelDave. My email address will also have to change soon, but I don't know to what it will change.

Worry Beads

2003 Mar 1, 5:22Today will produce the Mardi Gras parade in my town. I haven't been the previous two years, but I'm considering it this time around. San Luis Obispo, as a college town, contains many teens and young adults who enjoy occasional festivities accompanied with inebriation. San Luis Obispo, as relatively cheap beach front or at least near beach property, contains many vacationing elderly. As we all know, voting increases proportionally with age and, as such, any person under the age of thirty in public after dark is arrested. Mardi Gras is yet another of the bouts in the battle between the Youngsters and the Old-timers in the SLO ring. I will be very happy when this quarter is over. Chemistry may yet have a happy ending, but I don't know that Technical Writing can. I don't believe any grade in that class would make me think, "I'm glad I spent all those weekends working on that report". The quarter's end will also mean I can devote some time to my attention starved Polytope Tetris project. As a side note, I was tempted to, yet again, not write in the journal on account of my poor attitude tonight. However, a journal of one entry does seems a bit slim.