2006-02-10

Sunlight over the year

Ever reflected upon how the sun is not as high in the sky on a given time throughout the year? In Sweden, at about 60 degrees latitude, it's very noticable how short the days become in winter, how late they start and how early they end.

Last week end, I was playing with John Walker's Earth viewer, a seasoned tool that has been on the web for the better year of the past decade more or less unchanged, and as excellent throughout this entire time. Few services have that kind of life span on the web.

Anyway, I wanted to animate the sun's reach over the year, for a given time of day, over perhaps 25 frames spread evenly across the rest of the year, and loop it. Not a very difficult application to write, with Walker's service generating the actual imagery, so before long I had a working setup, peeking down at me from 20,000 kilometers above:

Sunlight over the year

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

If you are not particularly interested in the local daylight conditions where I live (chances are good you are not :-), you can always pick a more interesting spot on the face of the earth via my blog header, at least if you are reading this on my index page or on the day archive page, which feature that map. Just double click some spot on either of the map views in the blog header, and the globe will adjust to the new coordinates. Have fun!

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2006-02-08

coComment: a new contender in the two-way web

The two way conversation web just got a new player, after the ad hoc comment blogging hack piggybacking atop Del.icio.us as a public data repository backend, Commentosphere doing the same with a more custom crafted Ning playground backend and allowing for a bit more semantical data stored about comment threading.

Where these hacks have largely been a manual business for the end user, but which works across the entire web, coComment has gone the other way about it, and covers only a select few blogging platforms, presumably growing over time.

My own approach landed somewhere in the middle ground between these routes, starting from the manual though deadly precise Del.icio.us comment blogging style, partially automating the process for Blogger blogs with a Greasemonkey hack of mine. I did not move on to cover other platforms, largely due to a lack of ambition combined with my high expectations about getting good permalinks, to the very anchor of my comments -- so I can easily find and link to the spot on a page where I wrote something.

In this respect, coComment does not go as far -- it presently only picks up the comments you write and tie them to you, integrating the data with a few services for syndication and the like from their own site, where you can also track conversations by other members running the same system, and blogs where the blog owner has crafted his comment form to also run incoming messages by the coComment repository. There are lots of plans and high hopes about the kind of things we will be able to do with the coComment site and it's data, though, and they seem set on extending their coverage to a larger platform set, and involving external contributors who want to take part in helping this thing fly. An excellent combination.

At the coComment base site, the service is rather similar to off-site comment layering frameworks such as Hoodwink (where comments never actually touch a destination blog, though, but rather hang somewhere on a side server for people who opt in on the comment network's data only). Members may browse the site, fetch RSS feeds for their comments or those of other members. At present, these feeds are not as customizable as those of i e Hoodwink, though, where you may browse by any combination of blog, comment author and discussions where a particular author has taken part. They unfortunately only store (or present, at least) comment text though, so any links and similar HTML features of your comments are shaved off at the moment. I suppose it's time I head over to their feedback pages to share some user input.

To become a member in the beta program, you need to ask for a code to be let in, but said code is at least now sent out within a few days of your asking for it, so the hurdle isn't very high to leap.

Technically, the coComment implement their service using the cross browser, though laborious way of the browser bookmarklet. Brian Benzinger, apparently sharing my belief in automation through user scripts, made a Greasemonkey script for automatically injecting the coComment hookup code on blogs supported by coComment at the time. Not quite happy about a script I'd have to update (and find out when to update) manually as soon as coComment added another service (in the short time since he wrote it, they seem to have covered Flickr too), I cooked my own, which updates itself daily from coComment (userscripts.org entry).

It detects injectable pages the same way the bookmarklet injection code does (using the same ruleset as found in today's version of the injected code), but it appears it might need tightening up a bit not to inject on all pages matching those criterias -- the common Blogger post editor seems to be recognized as a comment posting facility, too. It will be interesting to see whether this post shows up in the system or not.

I just tailored my user script to exclude the blog editor from processing, just to be on the safe side, even though coComment did not actually seem to pick up anything on my posting this entry. Feel free to give a shout if there are any other pages on other blogging systems where I ought to do the same thing, by the way. Don't forget to include the full URL(s), so I can update the script accordingly.

And to coComment: feel free to use and promote this script for your user base. It works with Firefox, does not work with Opera (since Opera does not implement any persistent user script storage such as that offered by Greasemonkey's GM_setValue / GM_getValue), and it might work with Internet Explorer running Reify Turnabout. Installation is about as easy as the bookmarklet installation, the work on your part is as low, and running it is trivial, beyond even needing documentation.

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2006-02-03

Google Toolbar keyboard tips

Ever since I installed the Google Toolbar extension, I have been meaning to find out how to use it in mouseless mode to do the kind of things I usually use it for -- web search, image search and site search, mostly. Figuring it's so easy to add a hot key or twelve, I had kind of suspected that there would be some to instantly fire off a search as an Image search or Site search, right from the Google search field -- say, via Ctrl+I and Ctrl+S. No need to try those out, though; it is not done that way. Not yet, anyway.

I peeked through the source code today, and here is a run-down of what I learned (and have found out through prior experimentation), interspersed with other reflections, hints and tips:

Any AccessKey not already bound in a page (or used to invoke a Firefox menu), will bring keyboard input focus to the Google Toolbar search field. At least on a Windows system that means Alt+something puts you in the google bar. The mac equivalent is probably Command+something. I use Alt+§ (a very rarely used key that sits right below the escape key on Swedish keyboards).

The default Firefox search field remains at Ctrl+K, and is of course still a useful resource, even if you have the google toolbar, as the googlebar does not have the beautiful search plugin interface offered by the default Firefox field. (How else would you search Sinfest comic strips? ;-)

You don't need to keep the Firefox search bar on any toolbar, though; if you do not, it will just pop up when you press Ctrl+K, so you may hide it to save some screen real estate, even if you still use it for the odd one-off search plugin. It is not quite as good as the original panel mode though, as you can't switch search plugins quickly with Ctrl+Up/Down in the popup version. :-/ (If anyone has a bugzilla ticket id handy I'd be glad to cast a vote.)

The Google search field also has the Ctrl+Up/Down to switch search type though, between the few offered; web search, image search, "I'm feeling lucky" search, Google Groups, news article search, Froogle and GMail respectively, in that order. So Mail and Site search are only a step away each from the default mode. You can only switch search mode like this if you have checked the option "Remember last search type" in the Google Toolbar options tab "Search", otherwise Ctrl+Up/Down won't do anything at all.

Alt+Up/Down browses your past search history.

Up/Down on their own browses suggested common searches starting with what you have already typed.

When pressing return to fire off the search, you have a few other options too:

With the Alt key pressed, the result page gets loaded into a new tab.

With the Shift key pressed, the "I'm feeling lucky" search mode is invoked, so you instantly go to the first page found.

The modifiers stack, so Shift+Alt+return loads the lucky page into a new tab. They do not stack with your choice of search type, though, in case you had first picked Image, Site or Groups search, for instance, prior to hitting Shift+return - shift is Lucky Web Search, period.

The Control modifier is not reacted on in any way in this context.

Possible room for future improvement, there? I am considering doing some hacking of my own to orthogonalize "feeling lucky" and site search, for instance, so they can be bound on a modifier each and actually work as I would expect them to. But that is plenty of material for another later article.

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