Various nodes in the past, have suggested alternative destinations for the short cut links like [isbn://XXXXX] -- other nodes have proposed new shortcuts, which have occasionally created a lot of debate -- not so much over the shortcut, but over where the shortcut should go.

I'd like to suggest that one of the customizations available to users is the ability to pick where each of the short cut links go. I'm not sure of all the implimentation issues, but i'm imagining something along the lines of a text box per shortcut where the user can type in a URL containing some token, which is replaced by the URL escaped contents of that shortcut tag for that user.

Advantages:

I'm sure the implimentation would be non-trivial, and I know that in some situations flat token replacing wouldn't be enough (ie: if someone wanted [cpan://Lingua::Ispell] to take them straight to the package, instead of a search, an s/::/-/g would be neccessary) but what do people think of the general idea?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Customizing targets of shortcut links?
by mattr (Curate) on Aug 07, 2002 at 07:38 UTC
    I have to say I mentioned this several times about the cpan:// shortcut - I was never able to click on any of the links to modules when surfing at an otherwise nice bookstore/cafe which search.cpan.org had blackholed.

    I didn't push it since nobody else seem to share my problem, though the chatterbox was sympathetic once.

    As it happens, my own problem was solved since search.cpan.org changed their (apparently 1 year old) policy about my cafe's provider, or else come to think of it the provider also was recently changed (after the fact I think).

    Well, now we have a new search.cpan.org beta site which seems great. And there are some new functions there for example I noticed email correspondence about Mail::Sendmail in there too, so maybe it's becoming more sourceforgish. So if the search-beta site is not rolled in to the old site quickly, and if the search results are significantly different, then user-defined cpan:// would be a good example of what you are talking about I think.

    In general I think that user-defined shortcuts, such as for the cpan:// shortcut, would also promote the development of advanced and useful tools by monks and others.

    I also suggest that we add a new function, a list of beta-shortcuts. A new shortcut could be added by any monk (maybe make it an XP-limited thing?) to this list. The input form I presume would include the shortcut (not including ://), the url, and some code which would be evaluated on the user submitted shortcut url that would generate a proper GET style CGI parameter string. It would be really powerful if it could be real code, or even a full regex.

    But maybe it would for security reasons have to be a form that looks like an expect script.. just a simple reordering of + or & separated words interleaved with use defined parameter names, would be one relatively secure way of doing it. But I would still go for regexes.

    This would even more promote experimental tool development and might be useful (e.g. you might be able to reference a google search at thepen easily - assuming you still want to with tye's great new search system - with googlepen://Ovid+AI in square brackets). It might be my own wierd aesthetics but I also think it would be nice if you could call it like a sub: &googlepen qw(Ovid AI). (I'll leave ramifications to another post). Yes, I know cpan, kobes, and google are already shortcuts but you get the idea.

    Yes, I know this could get a little wild and we probably need some eyes or some great regexes to keep silly people from adding bad code. Maybe the idea of code executing on the server is just anathema, although it could be done on a different server even, maybe. Maybe the creator of a new "shortcut" would have to host the program it runs on their own server. Maybe the worst that can happen at any rate is some chatterbox tricks a la Katgirl's page. But I can see a whole landscape of exciting things this could enable. And what if the Gods let some of these things execute during page display and we could insert embedded IMGs of neat remote dataviz graphs and things in our posts? (oops that's another pet wish).

    Anyway I (humbly) think this idea is one for the books, I'd like to hear some comments about it. I think if safe, it could at once provide an exponential increase in the utility of every part of the site, not to mention magnifying our whole community mind thing.

[reply]
Re: Customizing targets of shortcut links?
by BigLug (Chaplain) on Aug 07, 2002 at 11:22 UTC
    This is an excellent idea! Maybe we could use some sort of regex with the URL that would be done by the site so that the cpan preference might look like this: 
    cpan rule: s/::/-/g
cpan url:  http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN/data/$url

    [download]
    or, for those who like to get a menu for the module: 
    cpan rule: s/::/-/g
cpan url:  http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/mod_perl/cpan-search?dist=$url

    [download]
    or maybe I have a customised CPAN handler on my machine that will install the module: 
    cpan rule: 
cpan url:  http://127.0.0.1/cgi-bin/cpan-install.pl?$url

    [download]
    If this is implemented it means we can all use our favorite information sources. (We'd need to change the google command to 'websearch://searchterm' though)
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

Back to Perl Monks Discussion