Xkcd Search Bookmarklet (Shallow Thoughts)

Xkcd Search Bookmarklet

Today's topics are three: the excellent comic called xkcd, the use of google to search a site but exclude parts of that site, and, most important, the useful Mozilla technique called Bookmarklets.

I found myself wanting to show someone a particular xkcd comic (the one about dreams). Xkcd, for anyone who hasn't been introduced, is a wonderfully geeky, smart, and thoughtful comic strip drawn by Randall Munroe.

How to search for a comic strip? Xkcd has an archive page but that seems to have a fairly small subset of all the comics. But fortunately the comics also have titles and alt tags, which google can index.

But googling for dreams site:xkcd.org gets me lots of hits on xkcd's forum and blag pages (which I hadn't even known existed) rather than just finding the comic I wanted. After some fiddling, though, I managed to find a way to exclude all the fora and blag pages: google for xkcd dreams site:xkcd.com -site:forums.xkcd.com -site:fora.xkcd.com -site:blag.xkcd.com
Nifty!

In fact, it was so nifty that I decided I might want to use it again. Fortunately, Mozilla browsers like Firefox have a great feature called bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are like shell aliases in Linux: they let you assign an alias to a bookmark, then substitute in your own terms each time you use it.

That's probably not clear, so here's how it works in this specific case:

1. I did the google search I listed above, which gave me this long and seemingly scary URL: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xkcd+dreams+site%3Axkcd.com+-site%3Aforums.xkcd.com+-site%3Afora.xkcd.com+-site%3Ablag.xkcd.com&btnG=Search
2. Bookmarks->Bookmark this page. Unfortunately Firefox doesn't let you change any bookmark properties at the time you make the bookmark, so:
3. Bookmarks->Organize Bookmarks, find the new bookmark (down at the bottom of the list) and Edit->Properties...
4. Change the Name to something useful (I called it Xkcd search) then choose a simple word for the Keyword field. This is the "alias" you'll use for the bookmark. I chose xkcd.
5. In the Location field, find the term you want to be variable. In this case, that's "dreams", because I won't always be searching for the comic about dreams, I might want to search for anything. Change that term to %s.
   (Note to non-programmers: %s is a term often used in programming languages to mean "replace the %s with a string I'll provide later.")
   So now the Location looks like: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=xkcd+%s+site%3Axkcd.com+-site%3Aforums.xkcd.com+-site%3Afora.xkcd.com+-site%3Ablag.xkcd.com&btnG=Search
6. Save the bookmarklet (click OK) and, optionally, drag it into a folder somewhere where it won't clutter up your bookmarks menu. You aren't ever going to be choosing this from the menu.

Now I had a new bookmarklet. To test it, I went to the urlbar in Firefox and typed:

xkcd "regular expressions"

Voila! The first hit was exactly the comic I wanted.

(You'll find many more useful bookmarklets by googling on bookmarklets.)

Tags: tech, web, bookmarklets
[ 22:13 Jun 30, 2007    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]