Network Lighthouse

I’ve just discovered Ubiquity from the Mozilla Labs, and it’s showing a lot of promise for changing the way the we us the web.

From the site===

Ubiquity is an extension Ubiquity is an extension that allows you to enter commands that have knowledge of page content and return new information.
===via Labs/Ubiquity – MozillaWiki.

In essence it is a firefox extension that enables users to interact with webpages in different ways.   For example, I tried my hand at writing a Ubiquity Command “Press This”, the same as the wordpress button from the admin tools page, to that I could quickly grab interesting articles for later posting.

The code is pretty straight forward

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({

names: ["press this", "blog this"],
icon: “http://www.wordpress.com/favicon.ico”,
description: _(“Launch a wordpress page so you can write an article about the current website”),
help: “.”,
author: {name: “Daniel Thomas”, email: “danielt@networklighthouse.com”},
license: “GPL”,
homepage: “http://www.networklighthouse.com/”,
arguments: [{role: 'object', nountype: noun_arb_text},
{role: "url", nountype: noun_type_url, label: "url to reference"} ],
preview: function preview(pblock, args) {
pblock.innerHTML = “Loads a new tab for wordpress”;
},
execute: function execute(args) {
var doc = CmdUtils.getDocumentInsecure();
f=’http://www.networklighthouse.com/wp-admin/press-this.php’;
e=encodeURIComponent;
u=f+’?u=’+e(args.url.text)+’&t=’+e(doc.title)+’&s=’+e(args.object.text)+’&v=4′;
Application.activeWindow.open(Utils.url(u));

}
});

Thats it, and most of that can be stripped out.  Now that I’ve registered my code into Ubiquity all I need to do to bring up wordpress is select some text and either right click and select “press this” from the context menu or type “press this” into the ubiquity website.

Now if you want to use this code yourself, there’s a few things you need to do:

• Install Ubiquity (check out the link above)
• After restarting firefox browse to “about:ubiquity”
• click on “Hack Ubiquity”
• Paste the above code into the window, making sure you replace www.networklighthouse.com with your Blog’s URL
• Click Save to File and save it somewhere safe
• Thats it your done, try it out by selecting this article, pressing ctrl+space and typing “press this”

-Daniel

One of my biggest gripes with the internet is that everytime I sign-up to a web site or want to download something I have to enter my personal information.

Yes, I know that web browsers can auto-populate most of these forms, but what happens when I change postal addresses or phone numbers?  I need to remember all the sites that I gave my details (those that I care about anyway), and update my details.

As an example of how important this can be, a few years ago I moved houses and thought I had updated all my banking, insurance, etc details with my new residence.  Two years later, when I was preparing to move to the UK, I called my car insurance provider to cancel my policy only to be told that I didn’t have any as it expired 18 months previously.

Of course I should have used a mail redirection service, but why does it have to be so difficult to keep my details up-to-date accross all my different providers?

Is there a solution to this? None that I am aware of yet, but I do have a plan on how to make life simpler for all.

More details to come.

-Daniel