Manic Code Monkey

March 28th, 2008 by Manic

I’ve professed my love for the site Lifehacker in the past. The site has gotten into writing and publishing their own software. It’s really good stuff, mostly Google services which I don’t use, but I still try out everything. About a year ago, one of the main editors of the site Gina Trapani, posted a Firefox extension called AboutThisSite. The extension usage column describes how it works

“go to a web site you want to get more details about. Right-click and choose “About This Site” from the popup menu to view your lookup choices”

The workflow for this is almost exactly the same as IE8 Activities. Similar software has been floating around the net, but there were not any others that were as configurable as this.

I decided to create the services listed in the extension as activities. In doing so, I was able to add the favicon for the sites. Unfortunately I didn’t find anything that could work for the preview window, hopefully sites like these might see value in activities and add their own. Activities previews and the sites that they navigate toward are domain locked for security to prevent spoofing attacks, so I cannot make up preview windows on my own site for them.

Site Report	Related Sites	Bookmark	Cache	Other
Snapshot from Compete.com Install Activity (View XML)	Google Install Activity (View XML)	del.icio.us Install Activity (View XML)	Google Install Activity (View XML)	Site owner from Whois.net Install Activity (View XML)
Netcraft Install Activity (View XML)	Alexa Install Activity (View XML)	digg Install Activity (View XML)	Wayback archive Install Activity (View XML)	What’s this server running? from Netcraft Install Activity (View XML)
Kinja Card Install Activity (View XML)	Technorati Cosmos Install Activity (View XML)	Simpy Install Activity (View XML)		Alexa Traffic Install Activity (View XML)
McAfee SiteAdvisor Install Activity (View XML)	Open Directory Install Activity (View XML)
Url Trends Install Activity (View XML)
Wikipedia Install Activity (View XML)

March 13th, 2008 by Manic

At work, I’ve been spending a lot of time on IE8 Activities. I’ve been a pretty regular lurker on the Microsoft run website Channel9, and a forum post caught my eye. Someone there wanted a Paste and Launch Button for the address bar, so they could take a URL that they just copied, and launch it immediately. While I cannot solve exactly what this person want, I think I can get close. Using an activity from IE8, I can take a text selection from a webpage, and send it some website. So, if the selected text is a URL, then I can send it to a site that will perform an HTTP redirect.

It just so happens that Yahoo does this for their search results. When you search for something on Yahoo! Search, the results are always prefixed with http://rds.yahoo.com. It also does this for their affiliate like AltaVista. So I made an activity to send a URL there.

And so here it is:
Launch URL activity

And here is a direct link to the XML that describes it:
View XML