Spurl.net now allows users to store a copy of spurled pages. Use the “Advanced” tab of the spurl! window, and choose “Store / Yes”.

When a page is stored, Spurl.net also indexes the entire text of the spurled page and thereby allows users to later search for any piece of text on pages that they have spurled.

This helps Spurl.net to further live up to the slogan: “You are what you read! Store it, search it, share it, use it” (the text that now greets new Spurl.net users).

The idea is that users will spurl and store everything that they’ve actually read, but just spurl (and not store) pages that they just want to keep for later reference. That way the index will correspond to what a user has actually read and thereby allow you to search for that little piece of information you know you’ve read but just don’t remember where.

Another obvious benefit is that this way you can be sure that your information will be available for future reference, even if the page is removed from its original source or lost via other means of “linkrot“. An invaluable feature when gathering information for research or writing.

I’m adding a functionality that will allow Spurl.net to store pages that require login, but as a vast majority of what most of us read online has open access, this should not be a serios drawback in the days until that will be available.

To search your spurled and stored pages, use the search page (or the search box at the top of the “My spurls” page). A document copy icon () indicates that the page was stored and allows you to open the stored copy.

In addition, Spurl now remembers your spurling preferences i.e. whether you last used the “Simple” or “Advanced” tab and whether you stored the last spurled page or not (assuming you’re likely to want to do the same next time around).

The next round of improvements will:

1. …make the search results more thorough, showing where the search string was found (page text, comments, title, description, etc.) and display an excerpt indicating the match.
2. …make the My spurls page more user friendly allowing different kind of sorting, filtering and manipulating the spurled pages.

Enjoy!

This looks bad. Second outage in 4 days.

This time it is my hosting company that is not doing their job. I just spoke with support and the problem is being taken care of, although they couldn’t say when it would be up and running again.

I am looking at different hosting options that will have more reliability and can run the service without hickups even with more increase in traffic and additional planned features. My current hosting plan should handle at least 10 times more than the current traffic, but they simply are not living up to their promises.

I’ll keep you posted on progress.

Update (March 9th): Hostway claims to have solved the problem with the server, and assures me that furhter problems of this sort should not occur. So happy spurling.

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:

<a href=”javascript:d=document;void(window.open(‘http://www.spurl.net/add.php?link_title=’+escape(‘%5BENTRY TITLE]’)+’&link_href=’+escape(‘[ENTRY PERMALINK]’),’_blank’,’width=300,height=150,status=no,resizable=no,scrollbars=no’))”>spurl-it</a>

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:

<a href=”http://www.spurl.net/searchurl.php?url=%5BBLOG URL OR PERMALINK]” target=”_blank”>Related spurls</a>

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:

Due to a neccessary DNS upgrade Spurl.net has been unreachable for more than an hour.

I’m sorry for any inconveniece this may have caused, but I did not know on beforehand that this upgrade would cause any downtime. In any case, the upgrade is a step in improving the service, so please bare with me.

The page is gradually becoming available again (depending on where you are sitting in the world) so please be patient. :-s

I added two features today that are natural extensions of the “search” and “related pages” functionality, namely to syndicate these results as RSS feeds.

Simply go to the search or related pages, perform the search you want to do or click the related icon () next to any webpage in the spurl lists. The little XML logo at the top of either results page:

…will hold the magic URL.

You can use this for example if you want to create a list on your blog that says “people that spurled my blog, also spurled…” or if you want to watch fresh spurls containing the phrase “search engine”. Anyways, it is yours to find out – I think it is natural that any possible list from Spurl.net can be syndicated in this way.

Have fun.

Two notable upgrades in the last couple of days:

1. If you block a part of the text on a webpage before clicking the spurl! button, that text will be automatically used as the text for the comment for that page (see the “Advanced” tab in the spurl! window). This improves the usability of the comments a lot, as there is usually some descriptive part of text on the page (e.g. the intro to an article) or you want to store the page because of a certain point made in the text and it makes sense to store that bit as the comment on the page.

   So, simply block a piece of text on the page and then click spurl!. Needless to say, careful comments make it a lot easier to search for pages later on as the search functionality searches the comment text as well as the title, url and description.

   Note! In order to use this feature you MUST HAVE THE LATEST VERSION OF THE spurl! BUTTON. Go to “My profile” on spurl.net (requires login), delete the old spurl! button and drag the new one to the links bar instead.

2. Secondly, you can now upload your bookmarks to your spurl.net account. The upload feature supports exported bookmarks from any Netscape compatible file (that includes Internet Explorer and Mozilla) as well as exported bookmarks from the Opera browser. Go to the upload page for further information. The step-by-step instructions will guide you through the process.