ActiveWords and Wikipedia....
I routinely find myself either reading or talking and someone mentions some idea or concept that I know stunningly little about. Rather than quickly indicate my total lack of understanding, I find myself going to Wikipedia and looking it up.
When you get to the Wikipedia, you are faced with a site, that because of the dimenions and scale of the whole Wikipedia idea, has a hello screen that implies that you must be someone that speaks say one of ten languages. English is at the 11 o’clock part of the screen, and the query window is at the bottom. If you click on the “English” icon then you get to the main English page. The Query window is at the lower left.
Using ActiveWords I had named the main page, “wikip”, and would type it, hit the spacebar, and whammo be there. But then I either had to tab or reach for the mouse to get to the query window. Clearly way too much work. So, as in all times of crisis, I E-Mailed our tech guys, and asked them to help me write a scirpt to get right the the query box.
The great thing about our little team is that they are so much smarter than I am.
In about 5 minutes I got back a script that is dazzling. And here it is:
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<inputbox:Wiki Search -:Wiki Search>"
Instructions as follows,
a. Type Add, hit F8
b. Click on Navigate to an Internet site.
c. Paste "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<inputbox:Wiki Search -:Wiki Search>" into the first box above the current button, and name it whatever you want.
Let me know what happens…my guess is that you will become a huge fan of Wikipedia as it will be a word away!
Works for me. Great! ActiveWords just gets handier and handier.
Posted by: Kay Brooks | August 09, 2005 at 08:28 PM
Buzz, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!!
Posted by: phil | August 09, 2005 at 11:02 PM
Awesome, ActiveWords rules!
Posted by: Robin Capper | August 10, 2005 at 12:06 AM
Buzz - this is a really cool, simple way to get more power out of Wikipedia.
Posted by: Des Paroz | August 10, 2005 at 06:39 AM
Buzz, that is just too dang cool! Thanks for posting it.
Posted by: Gary Petersen | August 10, 2005 at 09:34 AM
Nifty,
I've done a similar thing for imdb.
Create a URL AW and use the following:
"http://www.imdb.com/find?q="
Now if only Amazon made that possible with their site.
Trevor
Posted by: Trev | August 10, 2005 at 12:45 PM
Dang, the commenting system chopped up my script
"http://www.imdb.com/find?q={inputbox:Search the Internet Movie Database for:Search imdb}"
Replace { } with the appropriate < signs
Posted by: Trev | August 10, 2005 at 12:48 PM
Amazon DOES allow a similar approach. I expanded a bit on this topic in a post on the ActiveWords forum today: http://www.activewords.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1339#1339
Note Typepad doesn't deal well with the angular brackets and double colons in the ActiveWords scripting language. Part of the scripts lined out in the article and in the comments got lost in the RDF feed as well.
Marjolein
Posted by: Marjolein Hoekstra | August 13, 2005 at 01:01 PM
Excellent - any more tips like this one?
Posted by: Trevor Cook | August 28, 2005 at 04:56 PM
It seems to leave off the last letter of my search enquiry???
Posted by: Trevor Cook | August 28, 2005 at 07:11 PM
I redid it and it works a dream now
Posted by: Trevor Cook | August 29, 2005 at 12:18 AM
Is there somewhere I can go to learn how to do the scripting stuff, I can't get the amazon thing to work at all
Posted by: Trevor Cook | August 29, 2005 at 12:37 AM
I just realized I recreated the Wikipedia activeword. But the concept behind it covers many, many tools that can take arguments this way.
Technorati: "http://www.technorati.com/tags/"
USPTO: "http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?patentnumber="
and Many others. It's a great hack!
Posted by: jackvinson | November 04, 2005 at 02:10 PM
crud. Stripped my codes... Here's the format: double quote, URL, InputBox, double quote.
"Your_Search_URLINPUTBOX:"Prompt:":"Title is optional""
Posted by: jackvinson | November 04, 2005 at 02:13 PM