links page 7 - Dave's Blog

Missing Bee Roundup

2007 Apr 15, 4:06For the past several months I've seen various articles suggesting why bees are disappearing. At first I thought this was another crackpot's article that somehow made it onto digg.com. But they keep coming and sometimes from credible sources. After the article I saw tonight I thought I should go back and put together the various articles I've read on this topic. Bees may be disappearing due to pesticides, new organic pathogens, genetically modified crops, mobile phones, or climate change. Apparently, the US hasn't been keeping accurate counts of its bees so we don't know the extent of the situation. There's an interview with Maryann Frazier, M.S., of the Dept. of Etymology at Penn State and a congressional hearing on the matter.

I know this is all very serious and could signal the end of our ecosystem as we know it, but I can't help throwing in the following links as well. The bees could be hiding in this Florida couple's kitchen. Or perhaps they're laying low while being trained by the government to fight terrorism. Or they're hiding in extra dimensions that we mere humans can't perceive (I'm fairly certain that's what this article is suggesting. Really. Read it. Seriously. Its awesome.)roundup personal bees nontechnical

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