Busy programming

DotCon

I'm watching Frontline's DotCon right now. Ah...I remember the mania of the year 2000: my housemate Ken and I entered the Haas Business Plan Competiton. We made it to the second round and thought hard about jumping into the dotcom fray with our idea of letting customers create signs over the Web. I was enchanted with the idea of being rich quick but realized that I didn't want to throw everything else I was doing to get our company off the ground. So we didn't -- and I think it turns out to be a good thing.

Internal URL Implementation (IURL)

Warning: Tech Talk follows

I've been very much focused on the "internal URL idea". URLs + HTML anchors go a long way to allowing people to make fine-grain references on the Web. (Sure, there's a lot to improve: anchors require that the author put the anchor tag in the first place. Xlink (from what I understand) will help address this issue. ….) But what about putting labels on internal/local resources? I've thought about this issue off and on for a long time. (See my post on Udell's newgroup (which I should archive while it's still up.) about this problem I've worked. I've been interested in Word Bookmarks and Acrobat Destinations - I wrote about it on my blog.

After some work, I designed a basic IURL protocol for referring to stuff on my computer. I take advantage of the URL Protocol in Windows. (I was clued into the existence of the URL protocol when I noticed that clicking on a link (e.g., ymsgr:call?(510)+848-6242&p=First+Presbyterian+Church) caused my Yahoo Messenger (an application local to my own machine) to dial the number for my church. The URL Protocol allows applications to be registered to handle URL-like addresses on my computer.

I've written a very simple Visual Basic Program that now maps IURL:d:\Document\Interactive_University\docs\2002\01\IU_Journal_2002_01.doc#D20020108 to the bookmark "D20020108" in my current months' work journal. In fact, I can drop that "internal URL" into my explorer address bar - and it will fire up Word and highlight the bookmark in question for me. My IURL handler also accommodates named destinations in Acrobat. Example: IURL:d:\Document\Docs\2002\01\Scrapbook_2002_01.pdf#20020103.

One last thing - I was able to figure out how to get a better link between Netscape mail references and Ecco - the best thing would be a IURL to handle this so that the Netscape message can be referred to everywhere.

Next steps would be to extend this work to my internal Ecco linking system so that I would be able to refer to an Ecco outline from, say, a word document.

Now why am I doing this stuff? Partly to get back into programming. Partly to meet a personal programming itch - I do have stuff in a lots of different apps. Being able to name these spots would be a big start in

But I think of the deeper reason is the repurposability of people's stuff on their own harddrives. I want to be able to point to stuff. Once I am able to coherently link them, I can start to automate the extraction and interconversion of all these data.

(For example, I'll want to write something to walk my blog, extract the OPML, render it to WORD, or PDF or something - drop it into Ecco if need be - and create these IURLs so that I can refer to the stuff.)

Dec Feb

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