Hackszine.com: Web Archives

Archive: Web

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March 1, 2007

Pipe Your News Ticker

Pipes Picayune

Via the Hacks Authors' Blogs feed, we find Jim Bumgardner's Pipes Picayune & Daily Tube mashup news ticker:

Headlines from a BBC RSS feed are fed, via Y! Pipes, to my news ticker, which is implemented in Flash. Click on the spinning newspaper to read the story in full on the original website. This widget can work with any RSS feed, but I'm using the BBC because they tend to write short pithy headlines which fit my faux newspapers better.

You can include this widget (as well as others offered in Jim's bog post) in your own blog by copying the <iframe> code and specifying which feed you want to use.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Jim points out that he's now added an easy-to-use form for generating custom RSS tickers. Check out this feed of Hackszine:

Related:

Browse Craigslist Photos with Listpic

Listpic

Over at Parent Hacks, Asha Dornfest points to Listpic, a "visual Craigslist browser" that lets you search your city's Craigslist listings by keyword or category and display the results as image thumbnails. Price and location are included with the photo, mousing over reveals some details on the item, and clicking the image opens a pop-up of the detailed listing. This view helps weed out the listings with generic promotional photos, getting right to items that appear to be real, and becomes a big help for those of us who have a "no photo, no interest" policy for online bargain hunting.

February 27, 2007

Hacks Authors' Blogs: One Feed to Rule Them All

Hacks Authors' Feed

Ed note: In this guest post, veteran Hacks series author Paul Bausch takes on a challenge that's been on my todo list for a while, providing a solution that should be of immediate interest to all readers of this site and just might serve as a seed for future hacking around here.

I have a shelf full of O'Reilly Hacks books across a wide range of subjects. I contributed a couple in the Web Applications category, but I also have Hacks books about digital photography, hardware, scripting languages, gaming, and operating systems. The series has introduced me to a number of authors who are doing unusual things with technology in their particular area of expertise. I thought it would be interesting to follow each of these authors outside of the Hacks series by subscribing to their blogs, collectively. I figured it would be a good way to keep up with areas of technology that I'm not necessarily tuned into. I have a collection of blogs that I read to keep up with what's happening in Web Applications, but I don't have a sense of what's going on with gaming, for example.

So I went on a mission to gather the Hacks authors' blogs using the tools I know best: Web Applications. I started with an Amazon power query for books by O'Reilly with "Hacks" in the title via the Amazon API, and ended up with a list of 80 authors' full names. I plugged each name into Google by hand, adding the word "blog" (or if that didn't turn anything up, "hacks"). Then I visited the blog to make sure it was the Hacks author I was looking for, clicked the orange feed button in the Firefox address field to get the feed URL, and copied the URL to a text file. I ended up with a list of 40 feeds. (A 50% blogging rate among an arbitrary group isn't too shabby.)

I plugged the feeds into Google Reader, and renamed each feed the author's full name. Here's what the final list looks like (click for larger view):

Here's the list of feeds as OPML if you'd like to try it: Hacks Authors.

I've only been tuning into this list for a few days, but I'm already getting to know these authors in a new way. And I was right—I am finding out about developments in tech areas I don't normally tune into. I especially found Brian K. Jones's recent post about Fighting Specialization appropriate, something I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Related:

February 10, 2007

LinkBack: Trackbacks Everywhere and Without the Spam

The concept of trackbacks and bidirectional linking has always been really intruiging to me, but it's such a difficult problem to solve, even if you ignore the spam issue... and that's awfully hard to ignore.

Ted Nelson coined the term Hypertext over 30 years ago, and articulated its principles, most of which have been ignored in the triumph of the Web. One of the principle elements of Nelson's vision that was left out of the web is the inherent bidirectionality of hyperlinks. This just means that a link from A to B should be visible, and traversable, from B to A as well. A simple idea, but suprisingly difficult to implement if you start with the sort of document-centric model that the WWW uses.

The problem is that bidirectional linking requires a certain level of cooperation between referencers and referencees. You can't force every publisher of every document to maintain a trackback-style referencing policy or system. Fortunately, however, you can expect that someone will be in the business of crawling and indexing the web, and the topic of references, as any fan of Pagerank will tell you, falls squarely into the search domain.

LinkBack is a Firefox/Greasemonkey plugin that queries Yahoo web services as your browse the web, displaying incoming links for the web pages that you visit. It's pretty much like using the "link:" qualifier in a Google search, except that it does this automatically for you for every page that you visit, showing the results in a semi-transparent floating div over the document you are viewing.

Of course, there are privacy issues with sending all your browsing information to Yahoo, and the results are only as good as the search engine is capable, but it's a step in the right direction, and for the most part, it works. -Link.

February 4, 2007

Negative Captcha

Here's an interesting thought. The flip side of "prove you aren't a robot," is "prove you are human."

Though it's no easier to prove, at least it places the onus of proof on the spam bot and not your human guests. It's subtle, but there's a philisophical difference between requiring people to do something that is difficult for a machine, versus asking the machine to do what a real human will do naturally.

Damien Katz writes about one way to approach this problem with the use of CSS.

It's a neat idea, instead of asking the user to prove he's human, it instead tricks the spam bot into revealing it's a bot. It does this with a email field that is hidden from the user by CSS.

When a human user fills out the form, the hidden field will always be blank. But when filled out by a spam bot, it doesn't know the field is supposed to be hidden, so it adds a bogus email address and submits the form. When the back-end code sees the email in the posting, it knows the email was filled in by a bot and ignores the whole submission.

It's not perfect—this won't stop custom-coded spam attacks—but it does kill some of the automated, roving, spider-based comment spam. Working negative captcha methods into a dynamic changing-key system (much like current captcha but transparent to your human users) is the obvious next step, and I bet we'll be seeing (or should I say "not seeing") stuff like this very soon. - Link.

February 1, 2007

Stikkit: Open for Hacking

Stikkit API News

Apropos of my previous post today, in which I mentioned that Stikkit would "likely be the source of great productivity hacks in the future," I'm happy to report that the future begins in earnest now. Just in from Stikkit HQ, Rael tips us off to the brand-new Stikkit API:

As much as we believe in how Stikkit "thinks" about your data, only you know how to best organize your notes so they work for you. The Stikkit API lets you "get at" your Stikkit data so you can shape it, direct it, and mash it up with other applications.

Remember, you heard it here first. Now, get hacking and report back with the ways you're extending, tweaking, or enhancing Stikkit to suit your personal organizational needs.

Related:

January 30, 2007

Domain Hacks

If you're a fan of domain hacks like del.icio.us or blo.gs, you might be interested to know that getting a personalized domain of your own may well be within easy reach. Domain Hacks is a search utility that will help you find the combination of domain name and top-level domain that works for you.

I was surprised to find that my own name had a couple clever little domains available. Now, should I go with briansawy.er or bri.an? Then again, the email addresses bri@nsawy.er or brians@wy.er are cute too, though perhaps a little too precio.us.

Un-Snap Your Hyperlinks

Snap

Already tired of the relatively new Snap "feature" that pops up an annoying little preview balloon over every hyperlink on certain web sites? Well, it turns out it's pretty easy to get rid of them, everywhere. Just click here to disable the feature using cookie technology (or, go to the Snap page that discusses deactivation and click the link from there).

Before discovering this little quick fix (thanks, Paul!), I'd noticed the Options menu available in each Snap window, which lets you "opt out" of the feature on a site-by-site basis, or across the board:

UnSnap

I, of course, killed them globally and only reactivated them for the screenshots in this post. My web browsing has been much more pleasant since.

January 26, 2007

Auto-Correct Typos in Your Address Bar

URL Fixer

Tired of typos in your URLs? URL Fixer is an extension for Firefox (and other Mozilla-based browsers, such as Flock) that fixes common mistakes in your address bar caused by careless keystrokes. For example, typing hackszine.con will redirect to hackszine.com. The current version:

will correct common misspellings of .com, .net, .org, .edu, .gov, and .mil, as well as the protocol (http:, https:). It will also correct errors in country code TLDS such as .com.XX, .net.XX, and .org.XX. By right-clicking on the address bar, you can set it to auto-correct your errors, or you can have it ask you before making any corrections.

Note that the confirmation message shown in the screenshot here is the result of configuration. By default, URL Fixer auto-corrects errors, quickly and seamlessly, which I've found quite handy.

Related:

Firefox Hacks

January 25, 2007

NetFlix "Instant Watching" in Firefox

NetFlix Instant Watching in Firefox.jpg

For all lucky NetFlix users who see the "Watch Now" tab at NetFlix.com (indicating early access to the new Instant Watching feature) but are disappointed that the feature is IE only, Hacking NetFlix has uncovered a fix for watching NetFlix streaming movies within Firefox:

Install the IE Tab Add-on, and in the IE Tab options (Tools menu, IE Tab Options) add "http://www.netflix.com" to the sites filter.

As noted at the end of the post, all we need now is a hack for Mac support (actually, more of us still need the Instant Watching feature too). ... Well, anyone?

Related:

Breaking: Netflix Launches "Watch Now" Downloads (Hacking NetFlix)
Demo: Netflix "Watch Now" Movie Downloads (Hacking NetFlix)
NetFlix Offers Subscribers the Option of Instantly Watching Movies on their PCs (NetFlix Press Release)

January 3, 2007

Use Google to View MySpace or Any Restricted Site

A year ago, a reader with the handle of bigthistle posted one of our favorite hacks to hacks.oreilly.com, describing how to access restricted websites using the Google Translate feature. Acknowledging that our readers often have better ideas than we do, we recently asked Wei-Meng Lee to take a closer look at this technique, and he wrote up this awesome HOWTO based on the original submitted hack.

If you have a hack on any topic that you'd like to share, let us know by using the "Suggest a Hack" form from the sidebar of this page.

UPDATE: The MySpace Hacks blog has a roundup of related ideas in How To Use MySpace If Your School Or Work Blocks Access.

Related:

Google Hacks, 3E

November 12, 2006

RFC 2397 - Embed image data inside a URL

I discovered a URI called "data:" today which allows you to encode any amount of file data into a URL. This data could be an image, ascii text, xml data, you name it. You'll have to read the details, but you use it like this:
data:image/jpeg;base64,base_64_encoded_jpeg_goes_here

The RFC was drafted in 1998, so it's by no means new. It was news to me, though, and it's got me thinking of all sorts of interesting applications, especially since it appears to be implemented in standard browsers. Some things that you might be able to do with this include:

javascript based image editor

storage of attachments within a web page or blog entry (simplify file hosting)

post images or files to forums that allow url posting

sneak attachments past grumpy email filters

Anyway, those are just some initial ideas. You probably have better ones, so let us know in the comments.

Me, encoded in a data URL - Link.
RFC 2397 - Link.
Convert a URL or uploaded photo to a data: URI - Link.

October 24, 2006

Foreword to Greasemonkey Hacks

In his foreword to Mark Pilgrim's Greasemonkey Hacks , Aaron Boodman (creator and lead developer of Greasemonkey), speaks of the pride he takes in the association of the word hacks with his creation:

It has been occasionally noted that Greasemonkey is a hacker's tool. I take some pride in that, since I come from a family of relentless hackers.

He continues with a touching account of his own family of hackers, going all the way back to the need to hack that's been so central to the evolution of our species (humans, that is, not just hackers, which, contrary to popular opinion, does not constitute a separate species).

Finally, he ends with a sort of call to arms that Greasemonkey promises:

The next time you find yourself frustrated by a broken website, you won't have to live with it. You'll have the tools and knowledge to fix it yourself.

I'd like to think this spirit is central to all Hacks books and to every issue of MAKE (and, dare I say it, the evolution of our species).

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