I added a little pet feature this morning. I call it a “spurl beam”. It is basically a timeline showing the pages that you have spurled.
It may not have a lot of practical value, but it is kind of cool. It shows what is floating through one’s head at the time. To make your own spurl beam, go to the syndication page (login required) and follow the step by step instructions. Currently it is limited to a specific size (175 x 400 px) and there are very limited customization features, but I will add more of those later on. Among other things it will allow people to open your spurl beam to zoom and pan through it and it will allow you to limit the beam to certain category or categories. The name “spurl beam” is taken from David Gelernter’s term “information beam” discussed among other things here on my Wetware blog. Anyways, you can see my spurl beam to the side. As before, all comments and ideas are more than welcomed. |
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This is pretty neat stuff, H–definitely didn’t see it coming. I’ve dropped a copy on my website, it’s quite a novelty. I’m not sure how appropriate it is to toy with referral info, but. . . since the “beam” idea is to show the user’s progression, what if it could, optionally, display (or in an ‘info’ area mention) the referrer, giving an even better illustration of how the user gets from point A to point B. Since this would be an option enabled or disabled by the user posting the beam, I don’t think it would be a privacy issue.
The spurl beam doesn’t work for me when I pick the ‘Automatic’ option, I just get a broken image. The other options work just fine. When I want to view the image, I get:
“The image “http://www.spurl.net/spurlbeam.php?zoom=11912.278481013&id=878” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.”