Three days ago Google announced it's release of Goo.gl a url shortener which is more reliable and trust worthy (to a user) than other services such as tinyurl.com, tr.im, bit.ly, etc.

Now I think all web publishers should maintain their own url shortener which only they can create urls for and control, for example I bought the domain evold.ca, and use the subdomain r.evold.ca as my url shortener. I primarily use this domain to shorten urls to my other domains, like erikvold.com, but I can and do occasionally use it to create short urls for domains that are not mine. As a user, when I see a blog post that I want to share, I first check if the publisher has published a short url for the page, which any smart web publisher does, but for the other web publishers (the majority atm) I have to create a short url, which I can now use Goo.gl to do.

The problem is that Goo.gl does not allow users to use it to shorten links directly. Currently, the Google URL Shortener is only officially available via the Google Toolbar and FeedBurner.

Well, I noticed that this problem was solved yesterday by a Google Chrome extension called goo.gl shortener. Amit Agarwal drew my attention to this extension in a blog post he wrote yesterday, where he pointed out the important javascript parts needed to create goo.gl short urls. So I took this information and opened Goo.gl up with a userscript, a ubiquity command, and a jetpack to help everyone create short urls with Goo.gl, check them out!

This Jetpack is meant to help Firefox users quickly enable and disable Java or JavaScript, and it is my third entry for the Jetpack 50-line Code Challenge.

Java Settings Jetpack

About

This Jetpack will add a "Enable Javascript" and "Enable Java" menu items to your "Tools" menu for quick access to these settings.

Screen Shot

How To Install

1. Get Firefox here.
2. Get Jetpack here
3. Get the "Java Settings" Jetpack here

[More]

I wrote this Jetpack as another entry for the Jetpack 50-line Code Challenge, it is simply a 'Restart' menu item for Firefox's 'File' menu.

When I was trying to come up with ideas I starting thinking about replacing a number of Firefox extensions I currently use with a lightweight Jetpack. So I instantly thought about Quick Restart, by Juan Carlos Avila B, which I have used a lot in the past, but it had a bunch of extra data packaged with it that I didn't want such as localization (albeit I'm sure this is something others want), xul, css, and images files.

I've used Quick Restart for some time now, and still think it is a great addon, but I'm pleased to say that there is a Jetpack option available now.

Firefox 'Restart' Jetpack

About

This Jetpack is using source lifted from the Ubiquity Firefox extension's built-in 'restart' command.

Screen Shot

How To Install

1. Get Firefox here.
2. Get Jetpack here
3. Get the "Firefox 'Restart' Menu Item" Jetpack here

[More]

I wrote my first entry for the Jetpack 50-line Code Challenge a few weeks ago and I would like to share it with you now. The Jetpack is called Tweet This!, and it is meant to help you quickly tweet about a page you are viewing in Firefox with the document's published short url, if it is defined (otherwise tr.im is used).

Tweet This!

Details

The Tweet This! Jetpack adds a 'Tweet This!' menu item to Firefox's 'Bookmarks' menu and context menu, which when used, will allow the user to Tweet about the page they are on. A user can select some text on the page, or else the page's title will be used for some text in the tweet, and then the Jetpack will first check if the text + long url is less than 140 characters long, and just use the long url if so, but otherwise it will use my Get Short URL service (hosted by Google App Engine) to find the shortest url for the page, which is published by the page, and if one has not been published which is smaller than a length you can change in settings, but is by default 35. If the shortest url found is not shorter than the setting length specified then the tr.im service is used to create a short url for the page.

After the Jetpack has a short url for the page, and some text to tweet about it, it will finally trim the text so that the tweet is equal to 140 chars if necessary, then send the tweet, and notify you with the tweet if it has been sent (also the username that it was sent from is displayed).

Notes

• If you do not see a notification, then an error occurred, and no tweet was sent, so it will be safe to try again, just make sure you wait about a minute before trying again (don't be too hasty). An error would only occur if the Tr.im or Twitter servers return an error.
• The jetpack settings are pretty basic, and while they provide a range type they do not show the range to the user, or the value the user has selected in the range. Hopefully this will be changed in short time, but until then I'll just let you know here the Max URL Length range is from 20 to 100.

[More]

This is just a last moment idea inspired by the movie Starship Troopers which flashed in to my mind a couple of days ago as I was thinking about Jetpacks for the Jetpack for Learning Design Challenge. It is primarily a Microformat/Link Type proposal for rel-info with some ideas and prototypes demonstrating how it could be used.

Abstract

When you are reading something on the web there are usually pages which exist elsewhere on the web that would provide background information, and further reading if you desired to dig deeper into the subject(s) you are reading about. Sometimes some of those pages are linked to from the article you are on, but often the link wouldn't make sense in the context of the content, and using a link tag isn't very useful to a user, so the link is not made.

I propose a rel-info link type, even if just as a Microformat, for 'a' and 'link' tags to provide a link to context-sensitive information.

With rel-info a user can read more about the Movie that was discussed at Netflix or IMDB easily for example, because the publisher (or a script the user subscribes to, more on this later) provided a rel-info link which the user can easily find and follow with a Jetpack, Firefox extension, or some other browser extension.

Proposal

When rel-info links are provided on a page browser extensions can easily extract them from the page, which can lead to a large number of use cases, of which I am sure I have only just scratched the surface. There is another side to this coin however which is that there are a large number of ways that rel-info links might be added to a page.

Let's explore the latter case, first the person who published the page could add rel-info links, but then browser extensions could add rel-info links, they could also search for and remove rel-info links. A user could subscribe to a person's or institution's suggestion feed or script which adds and/or removes rel-info links to pages, along with using a AI based browser extensions to add rel-info links.

When the rel-info links are going to be consumed there are some other interesting possibilities, for example a browser extension could filter the links by a HTML 5 'data-topic' attribute by keeping a list of topics that the user dislikes or likes, the domain could also be used for filtering. A browser extension could allow the user to mark pages as read so that they are removed from pages in the future as another example.

Prototypes

To test this link type out with a Jetpack I first had to add it to some pages, so I decided to write a couple of UserScripts to do this demonstrating how they can be dynamically added to pages by anyone even users themselves. The first userscript was to add the rel-info link type to IMDB links, and another to add the rel-info link type to Wikipedia links.

If you install the above UserScripts then you should find rel="info" or rel="... info" on your IMDB and Wikipedia links. Once you have done that you can check out and install the "Would You Like To Know More?" Jetpack. This is a slidebar Jetpack, and when you open this slidebar the focused tab is then scanned for rel-info links, if any are found then they are displayed in a list for you to choose from, if you click one of the provided links a new tab will be opened for the new page.

These UserScripts and the Jetpack take advantage of HTML 5 'data-' attributes, by adding a 'data-source' attribute to the rel-info links added on the userscript side, which the jetpack was written to check for and display if found. This is an example of how HTML 5 'data-' attributes can be used with the rel-info link type which I propose to create more interesting results.

This Jetpack will add the Greasemonkey menu commands to your context menu.

Screen Shot

Get it at:

• Jetpack Gallery: http://jetpackgallery.mozillalabs.com/jetpacks/118
• Userscripts.org: http://userscripts.org/jetpacks/267
• GitHub: http://github.com/erikvold/greasemonkey-menu-jetpack