Get Qurli.

Wednesday 23 July, 2008

See, the thing with short URI services like tinyurl is that they have this habit of going off-line when you least expect it. Sure, they have some nice features like stat counters and baubles and little bells that go bing, but at the end of the day, sometimes simple is better.

Sometimes, all you want is the link — not the full tactical assault required to go get it. What to do? Well, there are some advantages to the do-it-yourself model, like self-hosting. Namely that it’s my ass roasting over hot coals if it goes down. Having masses of (dv) horsepower, which has this frustrating habit of simply not going down, also helps. :)

Thus, with sod all fanfare, and a reasonably low care factor, I humbly present Qurli, a svelte, quotable, simple and blindingly fast URL shortening service. Long URLs suck. Embrace the axe.

I originally built this URI shortening service (pronounced “curly”) for me. A handy place to horde all those annoying, potentially throw-away 400+ character URIs that I just don’t want clogging up del.icio.us or The Lab bookmarks.

Then I realised, why not just share the love? So I have.

Please be aware the service is still ‘very beta’ — just like the fishstick, there is distinct chance it might not end well.

Shortwave Search.

Monday 07 July, 2008

A command-based Firefox search plugin for Shaun Inman’s Shortwave.

After spending a little time getting up to speed in creating Firefox Search Plugins, I’ve crafted a Mozilla search plugin to drive Shaun Inman’s Shortwave, a command based online search tool.

“Shortwave is an extensible quick-search and shortcut system like Firefox’s Smart Keywords or Safari Stand’s Quick Search..”

The bookmarklet is great concept and is highly portable. However developers have spent time successively removing bookmark keyboard commands from each new Firefox version. Shortwave Search integrates functionality back it into the built-in Firefox search function.

Quick, Robin, to the Install.

You can install the default version, which uses the Shortwave hosted default search from here (fixed!):

›› Install Shortwave.

I’ve added the search to the un-official official search engines at Mozilla HQ:

›› Shortwave search addon at mozilla.org.

Alternatively (or if the above links do not automatically add the search) save the following XML file to the appropriate searchplugins folder, as listed here, then restart your browser.

Making it BIGGER.

If you have created your own custom waves.txt and would prefer to use that by defualt, then edit the above linked shortwaveapp.xml and append the following after {searchterms}:

&s=http://yourdomainname.com/path/to/waves.txt

Note — I have included an example (commented) for a self-hosted waves.txt in the manual download verson above, for further reference.

Which button, Jim?

You can prefix any search terms with the desired action, entering help will present the currently defined commands — for example prefixing a search with g will trigger a google search. Conversely prefixing the same search with a would ask the same question to Amazon.

Using the built-in Control + K keyboard combo (Cmd + K if you’re in Mac land) makes that search even faster.

To make Shortwave the default browser search engine, browse to about:config (you may be asked to confirm ok) and set the following Firefox pref to Shortwave:

Finally and in conclusion.

This is a reasonably simple implementation — it should work in Firefox and most other Mozilla based browsers that support the OpenSearch standard.

Special thanks also go to Mr Inman for developing this brilliant tool and for the permission to share the search plugin.

Wordpress Code.

Monday 17 March, 2008

A collection of themes, plugins, geekery and code originally developed for Wordpress, presently stabled here.

You can either jump straight into the plugin repository, or check out the themes if you want to skip straight to the good stuff.

Please note that the links above are to resources which are no longer updated with any regularity.