http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=179245

I dunno if anybody wants to take things in this direction, but lemme just spew forth something floating around in my brain. Mozilla / Netscape 6 and later have a neat sidebar functionality; basically, it's a very narrow HTML page that you can use to quickly access all sorts of content. It's great for Google (keeps the result of your searches in the sidebar so you can visit many results without using the back button etc.). But I'm not plugging Moz here so much as thinking it might be cool if PM (or the Everything engine) could generate a sidebar page with, say, the 5 most recently added nodes and the search box. It doesn't need to be fancy, and it wouldn't detract from the functionality of the site for other user agents. The URL could point to a page that's statically generated every so often so it wouldn't generate extra server load.

Building such a creature is easy: just spew out the HTML from a given URL, making sure it looks OK at around 150 px wide, and make sure all the links have a target attribute of "_content".

References:

I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of integrity -- F. Nietzsche

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Re: PM Sidebar for Mozilla / Netscape 6 users
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Jul 03, 2002 at 20:00 UTC
    Alternatively, you can implement this yourself using the newest nodes xml generator. :) What I'm saying is, it probably won't happen as an onsite feature, but if you have access to some webspace it wouldn't be hard to write a short script for it. Personally, I'm thinking autorefreshing chatterbox in the sidebar.. :)

    Makeshifts last the longest.

      Yeah, since the sidebar can handle any content Mozilla can, you could also style it any way you like; the same goes for the CB and the CB XML ticker, for that matter

      OK, keep an eye on this space or Cool Uses For Perl. Ima gunna write a little web client that fetches the newest nodes ticker and the CB ticker, inserts a nice l'il xml-stylesheet PI, and voy-la. The URL for the sidebar thing will then be a local file.

      Durn, doing my own dirty work. What is this world coming to ? =)

      UPDATE I have something ready to go that looks sort of OK in the sidebar (the size restrictions are quite limiting!), but I'm having trouble with getting Mozilla to transform the newest node ticker's XML into XHTML; one can, of course, use some other tool (such as xsltproc from the libxml project, or -- what amounts to the same thing with a Perl inteface XML::LibXSLT, or Xalan, or MXSML (with IE 5+) ) to do the transformation, but that shoots the portability of the scheme to heck. Soon to be posting my current working draft to Craft.

      I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system shows a lack of integrity -- F. Nietzsche