OUseful Info

National Statistics API - Discovery services AJAX demos

Last week, a call went out for government data mashup ideas, along with a list of government data APIS: Show Us a Better Way. i signed up for some of the API keys (though I still haven't received an NHS...

Tags: NationalStatistics API, showusabetterway

-->

Trendspotting Redux: Twist Twitter Trends

Several weeks ago, I set up a CoRank site to bookmark Google search trends to: Trendspotting. I think I'm also going to use it as a place to bookmark interesting Twitter trends to, too, using the Twist twitter trend plotter:...

Tags: trendspotting, twitter, twist

-->

remix 2: Blur, featuring Sir Ken Robinson...

Last weekend, I put together a crude video based presentation by synching a slide of presentation slides and images to a tune by a popular beat combo (Changing Expectations: Educational Publishing): Martin used a similar technique in his video response,...

Tags: edupunk, garageband, blur

-->

iTwitterous Rationale - and Reimagining as iCoShare

[Provenance: the first part of this post arose out of a conversation with Alan and Martin.... and a warning by the way - this is a long post...] Chatting with a couple of people about iTwitterous, my iPod Touch representation...

Tags: icoshare, serendipitwitterous, itwitterous, delicious, twitter

-->

Pivotal Moments... (pivotwitter?!)

Just walking the dog after a dog of a meeting, and I think I glimpsed how another couple of jigsaw pieces fit together... Sometimes people twitter a link; and their tweet is a bit like comment around that URL... So,...

Tags: pivotwitter, yahoo pipes, tiinyurl

-->

iTwitterous - Experimenting with hashtags and Twemes

So another iTwitterous update, this time on a really unstable, live developmental URL - http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ajc.php There are a couple of tweaks in this dev update... Firstly, support for hashtag links, e.g. you shouild be able to click a hashtag link...

Tags: itwitterous, yet-another-pointless-waste-of-time

-->

iTwitterous Update

Just a quick post to note that iTwitterous (serendipiTwitterous for iPod Touch) has had an update... I added a "loading spinner" that is displayed whilst the page waits for the Pipe to deliver the serendipitwitterous feed, and another menu option...

Tags: itwitterous, serendipitwitterous, ipodtouch

-->

iTwitterous - serendipiTwitterous on iPod Touch

[UPDATE: the current version of iTwitterous can be found at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/i/ajc.php; for more info about the updates, see iTwitterous - Experimenting with hashtags and Twemes and iTwitterous update] Last week, I got hold of an iPod Touch (thanks Martin), but...

Tags: itwitterous, serendipitwitterous

-->

Yahoo Pipes Badges Make It Easy to Share Google Calendar Maps

A comment on the previous post pointed to a use case example of how to embed a Google Calendar Map (gCalmap) in a blog entry using a Yahoo Pipes map badge: Mapa de conciertos de R.E.M. 2008 (Map of REM...

Tags: REM, pipes, gcalmap, calendar map

-->

feedshow Link Presenter - Getting There...

From time to time I give presentations based almost wholly around websites, or screenshots of websites, rather than a set of Powerpoint slides. This is particularly true whenever I do a "partial attention format" workshop, a typically hectic tour of...

Tags: feedshow, link presenter

-->

Plotting Course Profiles Data from Google Spreadsheets with the Google Charts API

For a week or two, now, I've been looking for some simple charting libraries (Plotkit looked interesting, I thought, as does this jquery chart plotter extension? and PS the new YUI chart control...) that I can use to plot some...

Tags: gChart, google charts, course profiles, API

-->

feedshow (feedpresenter) - Shortcut URL Splash Screen

Having just been tipped off by Clever Clogs about snipr, a TinyURL-like service with a simple API, I thought I'd start to integrate it into feedshow (feedshow launcher), my updated feed powered presenter tool. So here's what's new - if...

Grazring Grazr OPML Uploads: Bookmarklet

It's late, I'm in Belfast (taking part in a two day brainstorming session planning the W5 Robot Thought show (which may make use of the Robot Amusement Park activity we've been developing elsewhere as one of the schools' launch day...

Adding a Grazr Widget to a Moodle Journal Page

Whilst the Moodle environment lets users add simple HTML within personal journal or blog pages, it is typically locked down to the extent that users cannot add javascript or iframes within the HTML; nor can users avail themselves of personally...

statex - Global Variables for the Web

I have to give a talk later this week (In Search of the googLE - resource page will be here) and was toying with the idea of updating deliShow, the delicious web feed slideshow/presentation app, to display webpages listed on...

OUseful Calendar

As a New Year's resolution, I've decided to try and cut down on my date filing using scraps of paper in favour of an online calendaring solution. The calendar I'm starting off with is Google Calendar, partly because it allows...

delicious2opml Converter

Tonight's hack - a delicious links to OPML converter - took an hour for some reason, not half an hour, and it's another of those things that I don't really have a use for just now (partly because there are...

searchfeedr, pageSearch and deliSearch Combined Interface

To try and simplify matters with my various feed limited searches, I've pulled together a combined interface that allows users to enter the limit source (a web feed URL, a page URL, or a delicious username/tag combination) into one text...

Demo Book Details from ISBN Greasemonkey Script

My recent post on a script that will autocomplete book information details given an ISBN was based on a script that only works on a page that lies behind the OU authentication system, (which is one way of making stuff...

OU Traveller GM Script - Multiple Lookups

Last night, I tidied up the OU Library Traveller script a little so that additional lookups for a particular ISBN can be quickly added to the script. The result is something like this: You can try out the script here:...

O'Reilly Safari Lookup from Amazon Greasemonkey Script

Another stopgap arising from the Amazon wishlist/O'Reilly integration to do item posted earlier today, here are a couple of Greasemonkey scripts that do Library lookup like things for the O'Reilly Safari e-book bookshelf. Safari Lookup Safari Lookup (via OU libezproxy)...

Bittybrowser bookmarklets

Thinking in part about this post from an old friend, re-met at the Carson Future of Web Apps Summit, discussing how the Web 2.0 community (new Yahoo front page aside) that gets the techie bit of it extends about as...

O'Reilly Books Full Text from Amazon? Almost...

This is just a placeholder post for a half hour (?) hack I don't have time to do just at the moment... Update:Safari/Amazon library lookup bookmarklets now added... As O'Reilly are coming to the OU tomorrow (I think) [internal readers:...

Persistent News Search OPML Feed Roller

I had a bit of a dabble with the code of my social bookmarking OPML feed roller last week, trying to make it easier to register new socail bookmarking systems, so to see how easy it would be generate a...

Testing Javascript Includes...

A quick look at the clock showed I'd missed lunch (again!) so here's the outcome of 20 mins of playtime scratching an itch I've had for a bit: how to test Javascript functions that pull content into your web page,...

Formula One Live Data

UPDATE: check out my F1 Technology Channel on Splashcast For previews of forthcoming F1 races, and regular F1 news via blog, podcast and videocast, check out sidepodcast.com - "Your Weekly F1 Fix" It's Formula One Grand Prix race day, and...

delicious URL Rewrites

A little while ago, I posted a Firefox bookmarklet to hide items on a delicious links page that bore a particular tag (deliHide). Here's another quick delicious bookmarklet that will do a URL rewrite for you... What do I mean?...

WebApping - Web Apps Made Blog Easy

TechCrunch were reporting a new start up a couple of days ago that "aims to do for web development what blogging has done for publishing". WyaWorks' first (?) product - WyaCracker - allows you to generate templated, form based applications...

Improved OU Library Lookup Greasemonkey Script

Last weekend, I stumbled across a Talis Silkworm Greasemonkey script which offered a nice way of inlining results (in Firefox only, of course) for various ISBN lookup and linking services (the script automatically creates links to Amazon, xISBN and so...

Social Bookmarking OPML Feed Roller

Update: now works in IE7 Update: multiple, independently named feed profiles Try out the new OPML feedroller here. Over the Easter break, I had a doodle with the Social Bookmarking OPML Feed Generator so that it now supports: 1) the...

Web-based Presentations

I just picked up on Teamslide, a (commercial) web based presentation system (via Ajaxian) that lets you give a presentation remotely over the web, and it got me wondering about S5, Eric Meyer's "standards-based slide show system". If you haven't...

Rich Client, Poor Client

The web based discussion client we're using to run some Gifted and Talented kids' online academic discussion groups is not the most powerful of user clients, in part becasue when we set the original templates up we were working under...

Opera Widgets

Although I have way too many course writing things to do at the mo, I have managed to wangle a day a week doing things for the Library for 3 months or so, which should be a lot of fun:-)...

Pagelinks to OPML Generator

A little while ago, I posted a "OPML List of Links on This Page" Bookmarklet which identified all the links on a page and appended them as a cut-and-pasteable OPML listing at the bottom of the page. I've had a...

Performative Tagging - toprint

One of the many half-written technical reports I haven't got round to finishing is an informal analysis of the sorts of tag I've used for tagging my delicious bookmarks. One class of tags in particular is ripe for playing with...

"OPML List of Links on This Page" Bookmarklet

As requested by Library Clips, here is an \n\n'+tv+'\n\n\n');void(n=d.createTextNode(o));ll.appendChild(n);for (i=0;i\n');void(lt=d.createTextNode(r));void(ll.appendChild(lt));};};void(o='\n\n\n');void(n=d.createTextNode(o));ll.appendChild(n);void(b=d.getElementsByTagName('body'));void(b[0].appendChild(ll));}">OPMLify Page Links bookmarklet that will find all the links in a page and pop them into an OPML listing that you can cut and paste into a text editor, save...

In Search of Formula 1 Live Race Feeds

UPDATE: check out my F1 Technology Channel on Splashcast For previews of forthcoming F1 races, and regular F1 news via blog, podcast and videocast, check out sidepodcast.com - "Your Weekly F1 Fix" Another off topic post, but I can't resist......

Link Referencing Bookmarklet

Today's half hour bookmarklet hack is inspired (again) by Library Clips, this time with respect to a request for A list of hyperlink URL's for a printed webpage: Do you ever have a problem when reading a printed page from...

'Search Links On this Page' Revised Bookmarklet

Borrowing a few things from Otis' Simpy Bookmarklet, I've modified the Search This Page's Links bookmarklet so that if you don't highlight a term then it will offer you a pop-up search box to enter your search terms. As IE...

'Search the Links On This Page' Form

Just a quick pick up on the Search This Page's Links bookmarklet (updated version here) to say that I've popped the code used in the bookmarklet into a Javascript file (Search Page Links form script) so that a search box...

'Search Links on this Page' Bookmarklet

Something I seem to remember reading about in the past, and brought to mind again today in an email about deliSearch from John Tropea at Library Clips, who wrote: hopefully someone will come along and make a search engine that...

Hiding delicious Links containing a Particular Tag

As part of something else I've been working on, I would like to be able to view the links associated with a set of bookmarks tagged in a particular way excluding the display of links that are also tagged with...

Hiding delicious Links containing a Particular Tag

As part of something else I've been working on, I would like to be able to view the links associated with a set of bookmarks tagged in a particular way excluding the display of links that are also tagged with...

Doing Away With Passwords: OpenClickin

Background At the Carson Workshops "Future of Web Apps Summit", Joshua Schacter made a comment in the closing plenary in which he questioned the need for requiring a login ID/password interaction to gain access to web apps, suggesting instead that...

deliSearch - Searching the Contents of a List of URLs

Update (12/03/06): - when a deliSearch direct search is run, the Yahoo results page is now loaded into a results frame on the deliSearch page. Update (12/03/06): - deliSearch now supports page-based or domain based searches/search URL generation. So for... deliSearch - err - oops - it wasn't - I think it's better now, and seems to work in IE too, as well as Firefox... The script now makes use of the undocumented delicious JSON callback, which seems to have got rid of the race conditions.)

MiniSearch (which I picked up on via Library Clips) is a neat little search app that allows you to search the text of all the pages linked to from another page.

As an exercise, I've knocked up a web page that loads a list of del.icio.us bookmarked links -via JSON - into the page and then allows you to generate a URL that will perform a Yahoo! search for entered search terms over the JSON loaded links: deliSearch demo - deprecated: use this instead: deliSearch.

It's just as easy to redirect the page to Yahoo! as it is to display the link, of course.

Note that the size of the Yahoo! Search URL is limited. The script takes care of this by adding search URLs until a maximum size limit is reached (I really should pop up a warning to say that not all the URLs in the particular delicious tag are are being used if that's the case).

One way round the size limit would be to encode all the URLs as tinyurl's and then use these (would that work? would Yahoo go to the site aliased by the ?).

On the to-do list for this project, then, is the ability to specify your own user/tag combination. [DONE] This will require me to get my head round the asynch part of AJAX (i.e. build my first proper AJAX app...) because time must be set aside for loading the JSON object before using it to create the search URL. [Details of the fix follow below]

(This post has brought to mind the v unfinished SearchLink pop-up I started to play with some time ago... The idea behind SearchLink augmented pages was to enable a pop-up search box over a link that will allow you to search that page/site for a given search term. I seem to remember using a pop-up script that lost focus too quickly, though...maybe worth revisiting (or can someone email me a fix?)

PS I have just modified the file to load in a JSON object from an arbitrary delicious usr/tag combination (here *DEPRECATED*)). There is a problem in waiting for the JSON object to arrive though...in FF at least, just tell the browser to keep running the script... Does anyone know how to get round this problem, and if so, can you mail me the solution?;-) Thanks... [The fix was to load the JSON object from delicious using a dynamic script load, followed by a second dynamic script load to operate on the loaded object - a working version of the Yahoo search link generator for a search over pages listed in a particular delious tag feed can be found here]

PPS Note to self - here's an RSS2JSON service that supports callbacks... so I guess I can create a client side Yahoo search tool that will do a federated search over links pulled from several social bookmarking systems via their RSS feeds...:-) And that's not all - because I can probably get the results back in JSONic form too via the Yahoo JSON API...

For more, this is Web 2.0 moving into the client, which is gonna make it even more attractive for the hobbiest who doesn't have access to a server for writing/hosting server side web apps:-)

And as the above thought experiment shows, this opens up all sorts of potential for interesting client side search tool mashups (federss'd ('fed-er-essed') search, perhaps ;-)...

-->

Scriptaculous Slider Code Generator

As I've spent several hours on trains over the last couple of days, I thought I spend the time in idle code recreation, and the result is a slightly ropey, almost functional (in Firefox at least) code generator for a...