Lost Boy

Whilst digging around during the implementation of my FOAF Bookmarklet I came across a number of interesting bookmarklet techniques and examples.
I’ve started documenting some of these in wordtin. See Bookmarklet for an entry point. The Bookmarklet Bootloader is a very interesting technique.
I started writing up some notes on the techniques for using bookmarklets as service intermediaries last night, but have refrained from posting them yet until I’ve edited it a bit. This could well turn into a more fully-fledged tutorial as there are a lot of options.
Fun geeky stuff.

There are a few web applications available for displaying FOAF files in a human-friendly format. For example there’s FOAF Web View, FOAFnaut, and FOAF Explorer.
A number of folk have also started using FOAF autodiscovery to LINK to their own FOAF descriptions. This uses the same principle as RSS autodiscovery.
I thought that it’d be useful to tie these together, and create a FOAF autodiscovery bookmarklet. So, here’s a first crack at it.
Drag the following to your toolbar: <a href="javascript:void(d=document);void(el=d.getElementsByTagName('link'));for(i=0;iFOAF Explorer.
You should now be able to click that link and be automatically routed to FOAF Explorer if the current page references a FOAF description in the correct way.
This page has one, as does hackdiary, Semantic Weblog, and dive into mark to name but a few.
I have encountered some problems with the bookmarklet in Mozilla 1.0, although the same pages work fine in IE 5. If there are any javascript experts out there I’d appreciate a pointer or two if you can see anything wrong with the code.. Morten Frederikson has fixed the bookmarklet and incorporated it into FOAF Explorer, so the bookmarklet should now work in all browsers. The link is basically just a hacked version of Mark Pilgrim’s RSS autodisovery bookmarklet, with the addition of a check for relative FOAF file locations as sported by Internet Alchemy. A quick test of the original RSS bookmarklet showed the same problem, so hopefully its not just me being dull (but don’t rule it out).
Thats my sad friday night tinkering done with for another week!

I’ve just uploaded the final version of Spooky which is a little language for describing project structures and their default contents.
Just tinkering really.