Spurl innovation from Italy

english, Spurl.net

As you have probably noticed, there has been an upsurge of usage from Italy over the past 3-4 days. Welcome!

A lot of Italian bloggers have put the Click to Spurl button on their pages, and others are syndicating the lists either using the Javascript method or the RSS feed. Spurl lists of the Italian spurl enabled bloggers that I have come across can be found at the end of this post.

One of the coolest usage I’ve seen so far comes from Gat. As you can see on his blog, he’s put a “spurl it” link next to every blog entry header and even posted information to show how others can do the same.

This allows a blogger some flexibility, as it allows users e.g. to alter their blog templates so that clicking a “spurl it” link next to a entry header on the blog front page will spurl the ENTRY’s permalink, not the FRONT PAGE itself.

If you would like to do the sam, this is the code you would use:

Another idea might be to add a related spurls link to your blog, or entry – so that your readers can see the stuff that people that have spurled your blog have also spurled (i.e. related pages). Such a link might look something like this:

In both cases the text in the brackets (including the brackets) should be replaced with the appropriate content.

If you come up with, or see other clever Spurl innovations like this, please let me know and I will try to post them to share the joy. In some cases this also gives a hint to what users like to do with Spurl and thereby affects the line of features I’m planning to implement.

Update March 27th, 2004: Vanz at Maestrini per Caso pointed out to me that if the title of the blog entry holds certain special characters such as quotes, the javascript doesn’t work. This is correct and can not be fixed in a simple way. The workaround for those of us that like to use quotes in our titles (a lot I’d guess) now is to put a fixed title on the link, something like …link_title=’+escape(‘An entry from Mercury Labs blog’)+… in my case.

I will continue to think about this and see if I’ll come up with a better solution. Suggestions welcomed.

Italian bloggers using Click to spurl:

Italian bloggers syndicating Spurl lists:

6 comments

  2. This morning I quitely added a very primitive, but quite accurate automatic language detection mechanism, so instead of a page default being submitted as English, if the user does not define it, it does so only if it cannot detect the language. I haven’t done any statistical test, but my guess is that it makes the right choice about 90% of the time.

    I had thought of allowing users to define defaults for language (and actually for filtering also). The direct link to translating the page is an obvious next step, but one I had not thought about. I will implement this – thanks for the tip.

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