Monk Links reprise?

Sorry for starting a new thread, but I think that posting this as a followup in one that has now been inactive for a year or so wouldn't give it the visibility I think it deserves: in fact I bet that many "new" monks ignore at all the very useful FireFox extension that holli originally wrote and then bart took over and improved, called Monk Links. Personally, I had used it for quite a long time, but now it's some months it's inactive: the major pita being that you have to manually modify it in point of making it work with ever increasing FF's versions; nothing terrible, since it's clearly explained how to do so in the original thread, but still annoying, and what's worse... the thread itself has slightly gone into a mess so that I can't really understand where I can grab the very latest versions. Thus, in view of all this, I have a pair of questions:

where can I download the most up to date version?
why doesn't one of the authors, or someone else who's willing to pick Monk Links up (I presume it's OS) make into a proper "registered" FF extension, so that it will install and upgrade like most common ones with just one click of the mouse?

As far as the second question goes, I understand that the answer would be: time! and that since those guys kindly volountereed their time creating this tool, there's nothing that would require them to do anything more... yet it would be very gentle of them to do so and extremely useful to say the least for the Monastery.

I also have a feature request / suggestion: Monk Links was/is implemented as a contextual menu entry that would copy a link in PM's shortcut form. Now, what about changing its interface by making it paste a link in PM's shortcut form instead? It seems to me that all of the current functionality could be retained, but as a bonus (if technically possible, and I think it is,) when pasting an url, e.g. http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=720674 over some selected text, say "text" (without the quotes) it would make it into [id://720674|text]. Now that I think of it, this UI would loose the ability to copy an external link in PM's shortcut form instead, but I think that it covers more useful cases at the monastery. Or else one may choose to have both, but at least for me it would be confusing... Well, I hope this is food for thought for you all, anyway! Have fun!!

--
~~If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.~~

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Re: Monk Links reprise? by smiffy (Pilgrim) on Nov 01, 2008 at 02:18 UTC
If this is something that you really want, why not pick it up yourself? Based on your XP, I'm assuming that you have reasonable programming skills. All you really need is a knowledge of JavaScript and XUL. You already have a working application to play with, so it's not like having to start from scratch. If you are not familiar with JavaScript, there are a billion and one resources out there to help you. If you are not familiar with XUL (more likely), here is a tutorial (developer.mozilla.org) and there is also xulplanet.com, although the latter site doesn't appear to be working as I write this. I have written a couple of FireFox extensions to complement Perl web applications that I have written. It's not as hard as it might seem - packaging is far more fiddly than writing the actual code, or at least that has been my experience. I certainly think that it's a skill worth acquiring for any developer that is also a FireFox fan. (If nothing else, you can combine the functionality of various toolbars and get some of your screen back!)	[reply]
Re^2: Monk Links reprise? by blazar (Canon) on Nov 05, 2008 at 12:00 UTC
If this is something that you really want, why not pick it up yourself? Based on your XP, I'm assuming that you have reasonable programming skills. (First of all, apologies for replying so late!) I personally believe that this is a rather gratuitous assumption. In fact you can earn XP just by voting: don't confuse personal XP, which is connected with the presence at the Monastery and with taking part to its activities, and nodes' XP, which should reflect their technical value. If you are not familiar with JavaScript, there are a billion and one resources out there to help you. If you are not familiar with XUL (more likely), here is a tutorial (developer.mozilla.org) and there is also xulplanet.com, although the latter site doesn't appear to be working as I write this. Actually, you gave me same link twice. And yes, it seems down, ATM. (Incidentally, you can make your life easier -IMHO- by using the Monastery's shortcuts for the insertion of links rather than hardcoding `<a href="">` tags... That's what we're talking about, after all...) But that's not the point: what you propose is actually very good... however you can judge from the delay with which I'm answering to you just how "busy" I am. (In some sense that's terribly relevant for me!) Rather than rewriting everything from scratch, I'm pointing you to a relatively recent post of mine: fundamentally, things are still like that. The only variation since then is that I started actually using TiddlyWiki albeit on a sparse basis - but it's helping me more than the random txt files that eventually get lost all the time: I have the constant impression that I can "get our more out of it" and I'm actually reading its documentation to cope with that... but in small steps not to loose more time than it would help me to save. To be fair, I'm not familiar with JS at all and it is one language I would consider for learning. But... I simply have other priorities. Not only: I have other priorities and I seem unable to manage most of them most of the time. Only here, if you could see my chatterbox in this very moment, you'll notice that it's full of notifications of comments to which I want to reply... And then I have things to do out of the Monastery too! (Both in the virtual world and in the Real™ one.) `--` If you can't understand the incipit, then please check the IPB Campaign.	[reply] [d/l] [select]