cogdogblog: Bonus Feature for MT Bookmarklet Comments and Trackbacks

CDB Entry: Bonus Feature for MT Bookmarklet

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 14:42:31 -0700

Scott Leslie recently posted some well deserved praise for Bookmarklets (little Javascripts to perform tasks), citing them as vastly under-used but powerful tools in your web browser. The MovableType Bookmarklet makes blogging any website a snap, see our Blogging with...

comment by: Scott Leslie

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 15:52:53 -0700

Hey Alan, the ability to copy out text and place prepopulate it onto a form as part of a bookmarklet is very cool. I'm not sure how the MT one does it - the Radio Express one uses

javascript:Q='';if(top.frames.length==0){if(document.selection)Q=document.selection.createRange().text;else if(document.getSelection)Q=document.getSelection()};void(location.href='htp://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/radioExpress?t='+escape(Q)+'&u='+escape(location.href)+'&n='+escape(document.title));

The main idea being to use document.selection object and then pass it as part of the form posting parameters. Once one understands this principle, it's amazing the uses one can see - e.g. wouldn't it make sense to build a bookmarklet to help with adding a learning object record to a repository, and be able to select some of the relevant text from a page as the starting text for a description field

(I'll bet you've already built this and that's tomorrow's post, you sly devil!)

comment by: Alan

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:21:37 -0700

The MT one is fairliy similar, it is also passing some paramters used to set up the form options:

javascript:d=document;t=d.selection?d.selection.createRange().text:d.getSelection();void(window.open('http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi?is_bm=1&bm_show=trackback,category,allow_comments,allow_pings,convert_breaks,excerpt,text_more&__mode=view&_type=entry&link_title='+escape(d.title)+'&link_href='+escape(d.location.href)+'&text='+escape(t),'_blank','scrollbars=yes,width=400,height=800,status=yes,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes'))

It sends you through a CGI script to verify that one is logged in (if not you get the login screen, and then it moves the info into the form).

The one I use most is a Google one that does a search ona selected chunk of text:

javascript:q=document.getSelection();for(i=0;ihttp://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q='+escape(q)

And no, I am not as sly as you think. The approach you describe would work only for objects that are themselves web pages, but I guess could concievably be built.

But what I could see is a bookmarklet that would call a server script that could scavenge a page for RDF tags (auto-discovery) and pull up a form for creating a TrackBack ping- this would allow anyone to create TrackBack, not just an MT user (all of our MLX packing slips now have this as a feature).

Then again, no one really understands Trackback....