Lazy Sheep Bookmarklet

Posted: August 30th, 2005 · Tags: javascript, bookmarklet, delicious, cool, popular

38 Comments (Show Comments)

1. Frank Vasquez (August 31, 2005 at 12:23 am)

   not bad. a little slow sometimes; autotagging seems to only work for bookmarks that have already been tagged by others; but i like it a lot better than foxylicious. thanks john.

2. John Resig (August 31, 2005 at 7:24 am)

   Frank The slowness is usually due to del.icio.us, unfortunately. Tagging a new page seems to take a little while. True, the auto-tagging only works when other people have tagged it - I'm not really sure where else to look for tags... If you have any ideas, let me know!

3. Utter Doul (August 31, 2005 at 3:50 pm)

   This is really nice. Me likes!

   I am just having a slight problem with the configuration; though I select the options to give me a form to enter missing descriptions or tags, I cannot get that bit to work; it seems to default to using [todescribe] for the tag! Please help.

   TIA.

4. John Resig (August 31, 2005 at 5:31 pm)

   Utter That's really strange - you're the second person to report this problem - what options did you select for your bookmarklet, so that I can test it?

5. Tony (September 1, 2005 at 1:21 am)

   "autotagging seems to only work for bookmarks that have already been tagged by others"

   Isn't that the point of lazy sheep?... if others have done the work, then it autotags for you. If you're the first, then you'll have to do a little work because there are no tags. Unless there's a brilliant AI scanning the page for you.... or wait, if there was a tag for tags, tagged by the author of the page, then lazy sheep could possible cull it from there? I'm no javascript whiz :)

6. Tony (September 1, 2005 at 1:23 am)

   I meant to say "if there was a META tag for tags.."

7. Wytze Koopal (September 1, 2005 at 7:24 am)

   Nice! So far, no problems here.

8. 3stripe (September 1, 2005 at 7:29 am)

   wow! amazing!

   i'm lazy so i like this a lot. another step down the road to improve the del.icio.us ui experience which is pretty poor at the moment imo.

9. Kuqumi (September 1, 2005 at 9:53 am)

   I created mine with the option to close the page. Then I replace the code "window.location.href=" with "window.open(", and at the end I put "; window.replace(-1)". That way the del.icio.us page comes up in a new window, saves, and closes itself. The window.replace(-1) code navigates back from the "object" text which is the result of the window.open.

   my bookmarklet

10. John Resig (September 1, 2005 at 11:50 am)

    Koqumi That's a very smart enhancement - I like it! I'll see if I can't integrate something like that into the site.

11. itsnotvalid (September 2, 2005 at 11:37 am)

    I am actually quite unhappy with the results of the application. It doesn't work at all! I tried to use lazy sheep on a page without any body posted already - so it supose give me a form anyway. Without highlighting any description and and with no chossible tags, it files a post with no tags and description. I am using lazy sheep with "give me a form" when no descrpition nor tags available. It fails to give me a form when both of them are lacking (or one of them).

12. John Resig (September 2, 2005 at 3:43 pm)

    itsnotvalid What was the configuration of your bookmarklet? Do you have a copy of it? What URL did you try it on? I'm trying to duplicate this bug - I haven't been able to do so, thus far.

13. itsnotvalid (September 3, 2005 at 11:00 am)

    Here: lazy sheep
    I also wish to have a documentation of the bits and bytes of the javascript, so for example what tt means (etc).

14. itsnotvalid (September 3, 2005 at 11:19 am)

    And here, I created a wiki page of my settings.

15. John Resig (September 3, 2005 at 1:58 pm)

    itsnotvalid Excellent, thanks. What browser did you use this in and what page did you try to bookmark? I'll try and pinpoint this exactly.

16. itsnotvalid (September 5, 2005 at 9:53 am)

    Sorry I am not a good debugger ^_^
    I am using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; zh-TW; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6 (Windows XP SP1) have installed Adblock Plus with Filterset.G blacklists, and many other extensions. I also have Symantec Client Firewall installed, which may be the reason since i have IE and Opera tested but they have the same problem.

    Thanks.

17. jazzle (September 7, 2005 at 10:46 am)

    same problem as a few people above, no form to provide details.
    I used all defaults apart from changing
    If no borrowable description is found:
    to Give me a form to enter a description.
    and of course my username.
    Am using Firefox 1.0.6
    Hope it can be fixed!

18. Martin (September 9, 2005 at 5:52 am)

    Same problem, no popup when no description or tags are found, although I made this option.

    My bookmarklet:
    javascript:window.location.href='http://ejohn.org/apps/sheep/save/?bbt=1&qd=1&dt=todescribe&d='+encodeURIComponent(''+(window.getSelection?document.getSelection():document.selection.createRange().text)).replace(/ /g,'+')+'&tt=totag&u=surfsurf&bt=via for to unread&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&user=surfsurf&t='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&tl=6&blt=1&nd=1&bld=1&tlt=2&ld=2'

    Webpage to bookmark: http://www.minq.se/products/puretest/

    I get no description and a "todescribe" as a tag.

19. Matt Garrett (September 9, 2005 at 3:43 pm)

    Is it just me, or is "system:import" being inserted automatically as a tag for every new link?

20. jazzle (September 11, 2005 at 9:46 am)

    I've just noticed that too.

21. norseman (September 11, 2005 at 2:24 pm)

    DOesn't seem to put it in for mine, an it was newly created today. (09/11/05)

22. Bob (September 11, 2005 at 2:41 pm)

    If I have Kerio Personal Firewall 4 enabled I always end up at the delicious login page when trying to use lazy sheep. If I disable the firewall it works fine.

    Anyone familiar enough with KPF to let me know how to adjust the FW settings.

    Thanks

23. Nabeel Hyatt (September 14, 2005 at 11:56 am)

    Same issue, no form submitted. All set to default except I want forms for everything if there isn't already. Using Firefox 1.0.6, no pop-up blockers. I am behind a corporate firewall but that's never been a problem with any other app. If that could work this would just be a beautiful app.

24. Steven Thomas (October 31, 2005 at 9:16 am)

    Hi John,

    Great job. I have two suggestions, but not being a programmer, I have no idea how hard either is to implement.

    1. There is software outthere that interprets text. It seems like tags are just a matter of picking out important words. I can think of two work arounds that seem like they would be easy to implement:

    a. Autotag special words in the text, such as words that are capitalized (and not the beginning of a sentence) which should catch most proper nouns or the text preceding ".com" or the other web domains (although I am not sure how to avoid advertisements);
    b. Compare the list of the users tags with word in the webpage (I tend to bookmark a lot of the same kinds of pages) and use the matches.

    2. A batch feature. I get a lot of email newsletters and one in particular has a lot of links to current articles. ( Some of the articles are on foreign servers and don't last very long so they are gone by the time I read them.)

    A side point about email news letters is that they often have descriptions in the message, but I have no idea how to automatically capture it.

    OK, like I said, you did a great job and I hope you receive my suggestions as the beggings of a fellow lazy sheep and not criticisms.

    Thanks,

    Steve

25. Ariah Fine (November 1, 2005 at 6:21 pm)

    anyone interested in making one of these for Yahoo MyWeb2.0?

26. Mask2011 (November 6, 2005 at 9:16 pm)

    Hey John,

    Awesome bookmarklet. Brought me back to doing del.icio.us postings :) Thanks! Although, I'm also experiencing the "todescribe" tag being added by default.. This, even while I didnt select the todescribe option to be added when no description provided.. I took a look at the generated Javascript and this seems to be the problem:

    When you select to get a popup for a description when no description provided, it will still include the &dt=todescribe item to the script. This should be removed, am I right?

    I changed it and the below seems to have solved my problems:

    javascript:window.location.href='http://ejohn.org/apps/sheep/save/?bbt=1&qd=1&d='+encodeURIComponent(''+(window.getSelection?window.getSelection():document.getSelection?document.getSelection():document.selection.createRange().text)).replace(/ /g,'+')+'&tt=totag&net=1&u=unimportant&ned=1&bt=via for to unread&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&user=unimportant&t='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&tl=6&blt=1&nd=1&bld=1&tlt=2&ld=2'

    Hope this helps some people overcome the issue temporarily while the bug is being fixed :)

    Regards,

    Mask2011

27. Smith (November 27, 2005 at 10:13 am)

    Any chance you will release the server side part of this as Open Source? I can't feel good about it without having access to the code.

    Also, your site is unreliable, and is often unavailable when I'm trying to use the tool. I'd love to run a local copy.

    Thanks for a cool tool; definitely not knocking it. Just asking for more!

28. SanctimoniousApe (December 13, 2005 at 1:34 pm)

    1. I second the request for the server-side code - running it locally would definitely be faster, never mind that if for some reason your site is down then we'd all be screwed and you'd have a lot of frustrated users on your hands (not that they'd have much of a leg to stand on since you're giving this great service away, but I'm sure you understand it would still not be a "Good Thing" (tm) to have happen). Additionally, it'd decrease the load on your system to have backups to go to as the popularity of this BMLet explodes.

    (Of course, if you're using the information gleaned from watching what us lazykins are BMing to profit somehow, I guess I can see why you wouldn't do so)

    2. This may not work very well for those operating at lower resolutions, but I would dearly LOVE it if your BMLet options included opening an (adjustable size) frame above or below (another option) the page being saved with the del.icio.us edit page opened in it showing the results of what LS tagged. This would allow me to refer to the page itself while editing the saved BM. Dunno if this would work with pages that already have frames, but it'd be very handy indeed if it did.

    (Maybe this idea really needs to be a Firefox extension, which -- mostly due to lack of time -- I don't even want to contemplate trying to learn how to program...)

    3. Another suggestion I have that I think would be quite handy is to create an auxiliary BMLet (to be made at the same time as the main one) that would bring us back to your page for generating the LS BMLet and automatically fill in our existing options for refinement rather than having to do it all again (ayup -- I guess I'm just *that* lazy...). This may not be used as much when I finally get the hang of all things LS & del.icio.us, but it would be a big help in getting there. For example, I prefer to use !NeedsDescription and !NeedsTagging rather than your to* defaults because that keeps them at the top of my tag list where I'm going to be constantly confronted with the fact that I have 56,907,491,899,142,792,438,014 sites saved that I haven't properly tagged/fixed yet...

    (Then there are probably others who prefer to avoid confrontation -- and yet don't want to shirk their responsibilities entirely -- that may want to prefix theirs with "zzz" or something to keep them at the bottom of the list.)

    --
    Of course this may all be moot now that del.icio.us has been acquired by Yahoo! and the more civic-minded among us don't care to assocciate with a corporation that bows before an oppressive regime like China's government (or DUHbya, for that matter) and as such move on to greener pastures. (Or, since we haven't seen a post from you here since early Sept, perhsps it's all moot 'cause yer too busy with RL -- I know how that is and I hope all is well with you...)

    Thanks for everything, even if you think I'm a loon with these suggestions!

29. Quick Online Tips (January 25, 2006 at 6:40 am)

    This wonderful tool is listed in the Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection
    http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.html

30. skylights (January 26, 2006 at 4:38 pm)

    John said, "True, the auto-tagging only works when other people have tagged it - I’m not really sure where else to look for tags… If you have any ideas, let me know!"

    Here are two tools that create tags even when there are no preexisting tags:

    http://www.tagyu.com/
    http://www.worldwideweb-x.com/howToRunDeliciousSubmit.html

    Maybe you could implement the techniques into Lazy Sheep. I've used both. The second one is the closest I've found to a batch submit program that adds tags. Why hasn't someone created a program that adds folder names and/or keywords as tags? Grr...

31. Christopher Allen (June 27, 2006 at 4:31 pm)

    I've been using Lazy Sheep for a while, but starting today I get when I post a bookmark:

    "Sorry, please try again. A required security token was not received with your form data. Trying again should fix it. If the problem persists please contact support@del.icio.us. Thanks!"

    Trying again doesn't help any, nor does recreating the lazy sheep bookmark.

32. Victor (June 28, 2006 at 3:01 pm)

    I am having the same problem as Christopher.

33. Tom Adams (June 29, 2006 at 10:18 pm)

    Me too. How to fix?

34. andrew (July 1, 2006 at 9:56 am)

    I'm having the same problem, and i was using a different bookmarlet, then searched for others, and for each one, the same problem. i emailed delicious, and the person who responded doesn't seem to know anything about the bookmarklets, so didn't know how to help

35. Victor (July 3, 2006 at 10:28 am)

    Perhaps it stopped working because of the api change announced here http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2006/05/feel_secure.html

    I assume that John will have to update his code.

36. Richard (September 1, 2006 at 3:49 am)

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-delicious/message/296 explains the error.

37. Craters (December 1, 2006 at 2:47 pm)

    John: got the security token message; reinstalled and now works -- sort of. When posting w/Lazy Sheep bookmarklet, not grabbing/creating description and not inserting any tags. Tried it on Yahoo homepage (more than 5K posts by del.icio.us users with serious tagging) and got no inserted tags. Ideas? Also, even tho I selected your "take me back to the URL" option when I set up Lazy Sheep, I get thrown onto the del.icio.us post edit page. Isn't there a way to post a site using LS and not get flipped into del.icio.us? By the way, our family ranches sheep in Idaho -- very unlazy sheep...

38. Isaac (June 13, 2007 at 12:09 pm)

    I would love to be able to use this, but I've had the same problem as Christopher and others with the "security token." I'm using Mozilla's Camino on OSX and have configuration as Crater described.

    Thanks for your time and effort on this!

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