Snow Blind

A few friends have been talking about moving to the google chrome web browser. For a long time, I’ve been a big proponent of Firefox. And truth be told, haven’t had much of a reason to even look for an alternative. The game changed with Firefox 3. While Firefox still remains the browser of choice for many in the tech savy community, I know others as well as I have suffered through increasing instability and what feels like a bloated application. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an awesome browser and I still whole heartedly recommend it to any poor user I come across still using IE without knowing that there are better alternatives out there.

Good thing technology is always sprouting new seeds, though. I decided to try and feed my new gadget need and trying out a some of the alternatives. I’ll give Google credit. It definitely is a nice browser and I ,surprisingly, haven’t come across many gotchas while perusing the interwebs in my new chromed out set of wheels (pun intended). But it is not without flaws.

2 jump out to me right away. First is it’s handling of xml formed documents is terrible. It seems to try and view them as if they were html documents. Also it needs to have some way to handle rss files as live bookmarks. I personally find live bookmarks as more of an annoyance, but it’s still a standard feature in todays browser and I see no reason effort shouldn’t be made to make it contain the features that have become standards. All in all, this is a pretty trivial feature missing. After all, a browser is for, well, browsing html pages. Can I seriously knock it for having non essential features? Of course I can! But it’s still not going to keep me from using a good product.

The second missing feature isn’t really something that is standard, but it is something that has become so ingrained in my web browsing usage, that I dare say I couldn’t be without it. Yes, it’s my delicious bookmarks. I’ve tried various solutions that have failed for one way or another. I have recently read that the ability to incorporate plugins is on the horizon, so I have faith that a solution will be in the works form some one, but if I’m going to use it now, I will need a solution now.

Ok, so </rant>.

Start howto:

I did, however, come up with a quasi-solution. This makes it serviceable until a more elegant solution comes along. There are tons of posts out there talking about how to get a bookmarklet to tag sites to delicious. That wasn’t really my dilemma. What I wanted was to be able to easily find any of my 1000 or so bookmarks that I have already tagged. Isn’t that the point of bookmarks? To be able to easily retrieve what you have already found?

Well, since I normally end up searching through them any ways, I figured perhaps I could harness the keyword search capability of chrome. To create a new one, follow the instructions:

1. Right click the address bar and choose “Edit search engines”
2. Click “add”
3. Give it a name, something like… oh, I don’t know… “Delicious.com”
4. Then give it a keyword like say “delicious.com”. I tried to create one without the .com, but it didn’t seem to like that.
5. Enter the search URL. If you want to search just your own bookmarks (what I was looking for) enter this in: http://delicious.com/search?context=userposts&p=%s&lc=1&u=<your_delicious_username>

Now, when you type delicious.com <some search term> it will search through your bookmarks. Again, not nearly as elegant as the delicious plugin for firefox, but as I said, hopefully some gracious member of the community is feverishly working to right this injustice in the chrome world, but until then, I think this will get me by. Hopefully you too.

Let me preface this with: I have a very intelligent wife. Some concepts just elude her grasp of understanding. Like the discussion we had on why 4 wheel drive doesn’t make it any easier to stop even though that it being called 4 wheel DRIVE and not 4 wheel STOP, should have given her a clue.

But I thought this conversation was amusing anyway – even though it will likely end up getting me in trouble, I think it may be worth it.

Me: Street view of our house
Amy: why is your truck there?
Me: what do you mean?
Me: that’s our house
Amy: i know-but isn’t it like a constant satellite image?
Me: yes, satellites are flying around at street level constantly taking pictures of our house
Amy: they have zoom
Me: they have detailed zoom that can take a 90 degree angle shot?
Amy: cool, huh?
Me: earth called, it would like you to come back now

We’ll see what kind of backlash comes from this. If I don’t live through it, I hope you enjoy it as my last gift to my half dozen or so readers.

A while ago I mentioned that google had fallen short with it’s lack of rss capabilities for youtube. I also blogged about when they introduced youtube rss capabilities as a part of the gdata project. While not fully functional, it at least gave people an interface to add the functionality that was lacking from the youtube application.

One thing I didn’t mention was one of yahoo’s new tools that made this capability to tie applications together. Yahoo pipes has a terrific interface for manipulating data structures given by other sites like rss, atom, xml and json. It seemed to be an interesting concept, but I never really found a situation that I needed it’s capabilities for.

To play around with it, I decided to try to do exactly what should have been in youtube to begin with. I wanted the capability to know when the users I have subscribed to had put up new content. I made a crude interface to have access to that information but it was not without issues. One of them being that the ordering wasn’t quite what showed in the subscription center and the other being the structure of the data was terrible. I left it as is for a while and forgot about it for the most part.

I came back to it recently trying to refine it a bit more and make polish off the remaining little bit that I wanted to do. I did it by substituting a few of the structures to rewrite the rss feed I was using to one that worked correctly instead of the gdata rss file. That fixed both of the issues that were present the first go around. I did some more reseach and I looked through some of the clones that others had made from my original only to find some one else had done the same steps, but his was a bit more elegant as he did in 1 step what I did in 2, but they both still worked.

Taking that a bit further, I added the feed to the video subscription software, miro, and then I now have all my subscription downloaded to an application on my system when they get updated. No more going back to youtube to check and see what was updated. Instead I had all the information I wanted on my desktop when I wanted to view it. I knew when the information I wanted was available. I’m sure youtube probably had that in mind when they neglected having feeds just to force people to go back, but it really isn’t in the spirit of community. This allows it a greater amount of usefulness, in my opinion.

So feel free to take the pipe I made and share my YouTube dream. I encourage you to use it and share it with others. Let me know if it works, or even if it doesn’t. Hopefully it makes your YouTube experience better. Sometimes it’s quick to lose sight that that is what computers are here for. To make our life a bit easier.