Library clips

I’ve always wanted links in my posts to open in a new window, and today I finally bothered to work out how this is done, it took me 2 seconds to find that this is all it takes: target=_blank.

eg. <a href="http://www.google.com" target=_blank>Google</a>…you get this, Google.

This is very handy, how many times have you forgotten to right-click “Open in new window”, and you click on the link and it opens in the same browser, then you have to remember to use the back button to get to the earlier page…when you doing lots at once you may forget about this earlier page.

Anyway the purpose of this post is that the quick tags in my draft blog posts don’t include the “target=_blank”
…what happens is I highlight a word, click on the [link] quick tag, and a box pops up, I enter the link and it wraps it around my word, simple…but I want a [link] quick tag that includes the extra stuff.

I don’t want to type it in manually everytime, so I was thinking if there is a bookmarklet that I could use instead of the quick tag in my blog.

Or at the least, if I could hit the bookmarklet and it would pop up a box with the string: target=_blank, then I could just copy and paste this.

I wonder if there is a tool where you can program a key on your keyboard to type a word when you press it
…this way I could make my hyperlink as usual, but then move the cursor to just before the “>” , in …>Google</a>
and press the special key.

[ADDED: The way I was able to show raw code in this blog post was by using centricle encode/decode, this is one of my tool kit essentials.]

Podcasts are something I will get into sooner or later, I’ve missed the boat so far, but I was thinking…

As far as I know, if you subscribe to a podcast, if there is any new entries it will already be downloaded into the podcast feed, somehow you then load it into your mp3 player…seems easy enough.

I’m not sure if mp3 players can read text, but what about loading just a normal RSS feed into your mp3 player, then you can read the text of the latest feed content.

If you have a desktop RSS Reader on your mobile gadget (if there is one, I’m sure there is), you would have to launch to the internet so your RSS Reader can grab all the content, and then you can go back offline to read it all…cheaper than using a web-based RSS Reader from your mobile….but this method requires your mobile to have an internet connection.

What I’m saying is that you don’t need a mobile desktop RSS Reader, all you need to do is download the latest feed content from your computer into your mobile handset…then you can read a text version of the latest feed content.

Not sure if you need a program to read text, I’m sure it will already be built into the handset, I mean when you download the feed content, it can be in text format eg. SMS.

[ADDED 29/05/06: Textcasting : podcast for text]

Today I was looking for a blog post I made about OPML, and my search queries weren’t doing much as I couldn’t remember the terms I used in my blog post, so I decided to browse my OPML blog category.

I eventually found my post but it took a while because it was from over 6 months ago, and I post alot about OPML.

Now I can assign multiple categories to a blog post which is great, but I’d like to capitalise on this and do boolean searches for blog categories.

If a post has been assigned the categories “blog”, “opml”…being able to add these together and see posts that only have these 2 categories would help a great deal…this is nothing new.

A way around this is to bookmark every post in Simpy, why, because Simpy has great browse and search features:

Show me posts that are both in these categories…opml AND blog
Show me posts that are in either of these categories…opml OR blog
Show me posts that are in the category “opml”, if any of these posts are also in the category “blog”, then I don’t want to see them…opml NOT blog

What I’ve mentioned above is not searching, it’s just browsing posts in different ways, but you can also search this way, and limit it to different fields, or even combine fields.

eg.

Search for the term “feed” in the OPML category
Search for the term “feed OR rss” in the OPML category
etc…

Search for the term “feed OR rss” in the title field of any of my blog posts.

Search for the term “feed OR rss” in the comments field of any of my blog posts.

Search for the term “feed” in the title in any of my blog posts within the OPML category

Search for the term “feed” in the title in any of my blog posts within the OPML category and the blog category

Search for the term “feed” in the title in any of my blog posts and search for the term “feed” anywhere in the OPML category.

Simpy also has a search box to embed in your blog so you can search with these operators, by the way it also searches full-text, and results can be based on latest, popularity, or relevancy.

Doh
Actually, since Technorati Tags indexes my blog categories I could just add the tags “blogs+opml” at my user level, see here.

Anyway I still think blog searching is primitive…I really want to browse and search my blog the way Simpy would enable, and this will only happen if I bookmark all my posts which is a hassle.

Imagine if you could do full boolean and fielded searching across the whole blogosphere, infact Technorati does have boolean and phrase searching (but not for the tag search section), and what about fielded searching

…sure you can browse blog categories, but you can’t search within, or you can’t search just blog titles.

[ADDED: I forgot about Blogdigger, check this out, I can see all my blog posts within the “opml” category, but not the “folksonomy” category, and at the same time just display the posts with the term “feed”.

feed blogID:239657 subject:opml NOT folksonomy

You can sort it by date or relevancy, and even grab a feed.]

[ADDED 22/05/06: Correction to my Blogdigger search string:

feed blogID:239657 subject:opml -subject:folksonomy

…another way way of equating this is

feed blogID:239657 subject:(OPML -folksonomy)

Thanks for the correction Greg.]

A while back I was racking my brain on how you can be notified of a change to an OPML outline.

Say I subscribe to Steven Cohen’s web2.0 company OPML outline…

Firstly by subscribe I mean, I can include it in my own outline as an “include”, or I could subscribe to it in an RSS Reader like BlogBridge.

Now BlogBridge will tell you when something in an OPML has changed and you can choose to accept or reject the changes.

But if you have it included in your own OPML as an “include” you won’t be alerted of changes…you will see the changes if you recognise them, but you won’t be notified about them.

Or you may not subscribe to an OPML outline, but from time to time you check it out to see the latest, eg. I may check out Steve’s web2.0 company OPML once a month to see additions/deletions.

Superfan for Bloglines lets you know when someone has added a new subscription to their Bloglines account (basically your Bloglines account is an OPML Reading List), by providing an RSS feed for the account (basically an RSS feed for an OPML Reading List).

So how do I get this for other OPML’s whether they are Reading Lists or just text or link outlines?

NOTE: If you write a blog with an outlining tool, then the blog feed will be the outline feed, but what about for outlines that aren’t published as a blog?

Possible Solution

NOTE: Superfan for Bloglines will only tell you of new additions to a Bloglines OPML, it won’t tell you of deletions.

Now imagine if an OPML outline wasn’t a simple Reading List, but it was a link outline or even text or a combination, see Bela’s Reading List manual.

How can I be notified of changes in this OPML outline?

…when I mean changes, I even mean if a spelling mistake has been corrected.

A possible answer is using a webpage monitoring service that outputs in RSS, such Feedwhip.

I haven’t tried this, but if I use Feedwhip to monitor Bela’s Reading List manual’s Raw OPML or Outline version I wonder if it will work, I’m sure it will.

This is great as Feedwhip will notify things like:
- this line was changed from
- this line was changed to
- this was removed

Actually this is a perfect example as this OPML outline was created at OPML Workstation, where you can enable people to edit outlines you have created, just like a wiki
…with this enabled it would be great to keep track of the changes.

Anyone can set up a Feedwhip account and track any page they want, if you are a publisher you can track one of your own webpages and include an RSS icon on the page you are monitoring, that way people can just grab the feed you have made instead of having to create one themselves.

The next step is how do you include the RSS icon (created at Feedwhip) onto your own OPML Workstation OPML outline, this way people can subscribe to it, and be notified of any change…I would do this for the OPML’s I have created at OPML Workstation, but I can’t edit the template.

Feedwhip monitors a webpage for changes and it can notify by email or RSS, I’ve talked about Feedwhip here and here.

I’ve been using Feedwhip for a little while and have discovered that I have needed to tune my feed by setting my filters…this is very important if you are using it for a blog homepage or a blog post, as all you want is body content notifications.
I really think Feedwhip is coming out in front when it comes to blog page monitoring, as it is so granular, and it alerts by RSS as well as email.

When you are using Feedwhip as an RSS feed for a blog post you have to make sure it just notifies you of changes to the blog post content and nothing else, eg. sidebar changes, captcha number changes, date/time stamp changes, etc…we don’t want to see these peripheral changes, we only want to see post content changes.

The filter settings enable you to set a broad filter like:
- tell me about all text changes
- ignore small one-line text changes
- ignore medium-sized chanes
- only tell me about really big text changes

You can also set finer filters:
- ignore changes that occur in the bottom half of the page
- ignore changes to image URLs (handy if a site has rotating advertising images)
- ignore changes to link URLs (same as above)
…you may or may not want to know if someone has changed the URL of a hyperlink, ie. that hyperlink now points to a different webpage
- ignore deleted text (you will only know about text that was added)
- include images in my notifications
- ignore changes where most of the change is links
- ignore changes where only a number has changed
- require changes to contain these words or phrases
- ignore changes that contain these words or phrases

The email notifications can be set as it happens or as a digest, or you can specify the hour you want to receive an email (up to 4 out of 24 choices).

What makes it more enhanced than your ususal RSS feed is that it will tell you not only about additions, but also about deletions, that’s right, it will detect any type of difference.

Example, it will say:

This line was changed from:
This line was changed to:
This was removed:

Above we have explained how to use it to create an RSS feed for an individual blog post, the filter settings are essential to limit the noise.
What about if you want to use it for a blog that hasn’t got a feed, well you could do the same thing…but in this situation I’d be more inclined to use Ponyfish…I’d even use Ponyfish to create an RSS feed for an individual blog post but you can only use it at the homepage level.

Another suggestion was to use a BlogDigger site search feed, the search term would be the term you apply to a blog post every time you go back and update it, in this example the term is post794 (the term can be anything).

eg.
post794 - 1/05/06 this is a new update
post794 - 15/05/06 this is another update
etc…

This is only handy if you are adding a new line on its own…what if you go back and re-structure a sentence in your blog post, you can’t have the term post794 in the middle of a sentence (for changes of this nature I guess you could add this to the bottom of your post…post794 - 20/05/06 I made a change in the body of this post).

[ADDED 25/05/06: Another way to keep people updated with updates to your blog posts is; amend the blog post, whether it is reconstructing a sentence or just adding an update line at the end of the blog post, and re-publish.
Then goto to the blog post and add a comment saying that you updated your blog post, and what it was about, or even re-publish bits in the comments…the important thing is that people can subscribe to the RSS comments for that post, or even your RSS comments in general.

Some people use the comments field to publish updates…instead, we can update within the blog post, and use the comments field to alert people that you have updated your blog post.]