ShireWiki URL beautification / Protip: smart keywords
Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2008 5:48 pm
One day I'll get around to doing things that people actually asked me to do instead of just coming up with "hey, I'll do this"... oh well, for what it's worth: You can now use beautified URLs on ShireWiki. They're of the form shireroth.org/shirewiki/articlename, for instance http://shireroth.org/shirewiki/Straylight .
The reason why I did this was actually that I made myself a smart keyword for ShireWiki. You can do the same if you're running Mozilla Firefox. I already use a smart keyword for Wikipedia, so if I, for instance, want to read up on gnomes, I can just type in "w gnome" to my address bar and be taken to the article. Thanks largely to all the work done by Jacobus, it's starting to become an excellent reference on all sorts of Shirithian affairs and history (though I'd prefer it were more specifically Shirithian and not generally micronational), so I figured it's time to give it the same treatment.
Now that ShireWiki URLs are beautified, making a smart keyword for ShireWiki takes just a few clicks. Go to ShireWiki, left-click on the search box, choose "Add a Keyword for this search", name it whatever you like ("ShireWiki" is a good choice), and give it a suitably short keyword (I chose "s"). Now you can look up ShireWiki articles by simply typing in "s article", for instance "s Mors I" will get you to the article on Kaiser Mors I.
I only tested the URL rewriting very cursorily, so please try out different things with the Wiki and see if they still work.
Also note: All old links to the wiki should still work. If they don't, something's wrong, and you should report it.
(Trying to use the smart keywords that Firefox produces this way directly without the beautified URLs would have, well, not worked Firefox would have sent a query string with two question marks, which the server wouldn't be able to make sense of. This problem was fixable and I was originally going to write a post about how to fix the keyword, but then I decided it would be easier to just fix the server
.)
The reason why I did this was actually that I made myself a smart keyword for ShireWiki. You can do the same if you're running Mozilla Firefox. I already use a smart keyword for Wikipedia, so if I, for instance, want to read up on gnomes, I can just type in "w gnome" to my address bar and be taken to the article. Thanks largely to all the work done by Jacobus, it's starting to become an excellent reference on all sorts of Shirithian affairs and history (though I'd prefer it were more specifically Shirithian and not generally micronational), so I figured it's time to give it the same treatment.
Now that ShireWiki URLs are beautified, making a smart keyword for ShireWiki takes just a few clicks. Go to ShireWiki, left-click on the search box, choose "Add a Keyword for this search", name it whatever you like ("ShireWiki" is a good choice), and give it a suitably short keyword (I chose "s"). Now you can look up ShireWiki articles by simply typing in "s article", for instance "s Mors I" will get you to the article on Kaiser Mors I.
I only tested the URL rewriting very cursorily, so please try out different things with the Wiki and see if they still work.
Also note: All old links to the wiki should still work. If they don't, something's wrong, and you should report it.
(Trying to use the smart keywords that Firefox produces this way directly without the beautified URLs would have, well, not worked Firefox would have sent a query string with two question marks, which the server wouldn't be able to make sense of. This problem was fixable and I was originally going to write a post about how to fix the keyword, but then I decided it would be easier to just fix the server
.)