Firefox extension for Cohere
I’ve started to build a Firefox extension for Cohere. This is the first time I’ve ever had a go creating FF add-on, but it seems straightforward enough so far, thanks to some good examples and explanation. In couple of hours I’ve got my head around basically how it works and even created the requisite helloworld plugin, though for originality I called mine Cohere… just to prove it here’s a screenshot…
However I think that’s the easy part over with now and it’s only going to get more tricky. Not from the point of view of creating the actual add-on, but figuring out how to make it easy to use. What we’re trying to build is something along this lines of the del.icio.us firefox add-on, but the difference being that we want to offer users the ability to make connections between 2 websites (or bits of text grabbed from websites), which means the add-on will need to have a neat way of storing one idea, whilst the user is browsing the web searching for the next idea to make the connection to.
My thinking at the moment is that when you make an idea from a page it will automatically create the node for you and give you a short list of your most recent ideas you have added to make connections between.
When I get a chance, I was intending to do a bookmarklet that would pull in a jscript to:
1) add an onclick event to each <a> tag that would:
2) call a php script using something like:
http://example.com/dblmark.php?from=$1&to=$2&fromtitle=$3&linktxt=$4
3) where:
$1=window.location;
$2=this_a.href;
$3=document.getElementsByTagName(‘title’)[0]
$4=this_a.innerHTML (eg in some text $4=”some text”)
4) dblmark.php would then add the two urls to cohere, linked by the link text;
an additional call in the php script would fetch the title of the ‘to’ page to label the ‘to’ link;
the from link would be given the current page title.
The intention of this is to bookmark from:to link pairs in a single go. The code is also a step on the way to doing something more elaborate that i haven’t pondered yet…;-)
tony
Thanks Tony – had to slightly edit your post as the <a> tag wasn’t showing. I hadn’t thought of doing it that way, I can see how that would work though I guess you’d want to have the option to turn the ‘onclick’ on/off – else you’ll generate 1000′s of (not always meaningful?) connections!