I have a web site that displays a table of contents, and I'd like to use the Google Plus One button as a kind of persistent "favourite" marker. So a user would Plus One a page, and then in my table of contents I would show that page as being "Plus Oned" somehow (either bold the entry, show a plus image or something similar).
So is there any way to call the Plus One api to find out if a URL has been "Plus Oned" by the current user?
Note that I don't want to get the plus one count (as shown at http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google_plus_one_button_seo_count_api/) and I don't want to have to manually intercept plus one clicks and store the details myself.
http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google_plus_one_button_seo_count_api/ may do what I want. The isSetByViewer parameter that is returned is possibly what I want, but simply calling the web service as described in the web page always returns a isSetByViewer value of false. I would assume that some other undocumented data or cookie/header information would have to be sent to the web service identify the current user.
There is a pos.plusones.getSignupState in the hidden API, which you can try to experiment with instead of pos.plusones.get. Other than that, I think you should specify the G+ user id in the userID parameter.
Furthermore, you can try to sniff the network traffic for the +1 button with wireshark, webkit inspector and chrome://net-internals (watch SPDY traffic to client6.google.com). OR you could try to debug the js code with step to find what variable makes the +1 button highlight.
Related
I find myself having to interact with a web page that hides state in various places so that one cannot easily share it as a URL, for example this page which allows users to look up information from city zoning applications:
https://aca.cityofberkeley.info/community/Default.aspx
You can interact with the page all you want, but the URL in the location bar will remain the same as the above.
Currently, city staff provide users with instructions like "Load this URL, click on the 'Zoning' tab, enter DRCP2020-0010 under the 'Permit Number' field, click 'Search', then when the records come up, click 'Record Info' and then select 'Attachments' from the dropdown menu, then click on the PDF document that says '2020-10-21_DRCP_APP_PCKT_2801 Adeline.pdf'". I would like to be able to replace these instructions with a URL.
Another example is the website where video from city council meetings is archived:
http://berkeley.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?publish_id=cbebb4e6-5b83-11eb-920e-0050569183fa
It would be nice to be able to produce a link which brings up one of the meeting videos, and seeks to a certain timestamp like 53:40, so that I can refer to something specific that was said at a meeting.
Looking at the pages that are loaded when I follow the instructions in each case, I can see that there are some POST forms, cookies, hidden input fields, and so on.
Is there some kind of tool that I can use to create "deep links" to pages like these, that were generated using non-URL hidden state, which will allow me to quickly share what I'm looking at with another user?
What I'm seeking is similar to the frmget "bookmarklet", which changes the forms on a page to use GET instead of POST. Sometimes this succeeds in producing a URL which captures form submission query parameters. However, it doesn't work for these applications, for whatever reason.
This question is possibly related to the idea of capturing a web page's DOM state using "browser screenshots" and a script called html2canvas. A possible solution might involve getting and setting cookies in a bookmarklet. Ideally something that produces a normal "https://" URL would be ideal, but if it is impossible to solve the problem except by outputting a "javascript:" URL (bookmarklet) then that is acceptable to me (in spite of the security implications). Thanks.
That seems like not a programming matter. It seems like the site has some security issues as well.
QUESTION A: About Zoning
Here are some links you can use
Direct link to Zoning (I've found it via Advanced search from the site):
https://aca.cityofberkeley.info/CitizenAccess/Cap/CapHome.aspx?module=Planning&TabName=Planning&TabList=Home%7C0%7CBuilding%7C1%7CHousing%7C2%7CPlanning%7C3%7CFire%7C4%7CLicenses%7C5%7CPublicWorks%7C6%7CCurrentTabIndex%7C3
A strange link to the list of files (I've found it via downloading a file, then going to chrome://downloads, then right-clicking the file I've download. The link has been the following):
https://aca.cityofberkeley.info/CitizenAccess/FileUpload/AttachmentsList.aspx?iframeid=ctl00_PlaceHolderMain_attachmentEdit&module=Planning&isInConfirm=False&isdetail=True&isaccountmanager=False&isAdmin=True&isPeopleDocument=&agencyCode=BERKELEY&isForConditionDocument=N
It still doesn't give the direct link to the file, but it it gives the list of attachement of the previously opened Zoning record.
Currently I have no idea what file is triggered by javascipt:__doPostBack('attachmentList$gdvAttachmentList$ctl02$lnkFileName','').
In any case, based on what we have, step one, and then step two seems like minimize the path to download the file. I guess there could be a way to download the file directly, but I currently don't see any easy way. Maybe someone else could figure it out.
QUESTION B: About video
I've used an embed link that shows all the attributes that can be used.
There is a pretty strange but working way to give the exact timestamp. Change starttime from the link below:
https://berkeley.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?publish_id=cbebb4e6-5b83-11eb-920e-0050569183fa&starttime=0&stoptime=undefined&autostart=1
So replacing 0 for 3600 will rewind the video forward by one hour (3600 seconds):
https://berkeley.granicus.com/MediaPlayer.php?publish_id=cbebb4e6-5b83-11eb-920e-0050569183fa&starttime=3600&stoptime=undefined&autostart=1
The problem here is that ... you cannot rewind back manually that particular hour (it just gets kind cropped out). But it works to show the exact episode.
That's a pretty strange site.
I looked on SO, here, a few other places & ... cluelessness set's in.
What is the structure of the Facebook " Like " Button found all over websites ?
Is it a Social Bookmarking, Browser Button kind ?
Is there a step by step process (without using FB Api) to make my own kind of button.
How to design & implement a Like Button ?
I want my own button with similar functionality as FB but NOT related or developed on their platform! I am trying to input this in iWeb'09 as a html widget.
I've done this successfully. Here's how i did it:
You have a table in a database called "likes" with fields username,postid (and date, id if you want too)
Each post/blog/article should have its own id.
When someone likes a post/blog/article, you take the id of the post/blog/article and the username who liked it and check the likes database to see if it already exists. If it already exists, you remove the like. If it does not exist you add a like.
For example with AJAX, this is how i did it specifically:
I have a blog post with id 6.
Jonathan likes this post.
These 2 variables are sent via a post form and wait for a response, likes logic checks database to see if this record already exists in likes table (username,postid) values ('Jonathan', 6) if the response is 1 (or true), then i update the div number for the likes button from whatever value was there originally and add 1. If the response is 0 (or false) then i take the original value in the likes counter and remove 1.
To answer your question consider what happens with buttons and then go into like buttons.
Pressing a button triggers an event on client which may or may not update a server somewhere to notify that a button has been pressed for such and such intention. You can send a lot of extra info with this event like when and where who and why etc
Like buttons usually have extra info on who liked it and what they like. In order to get that you might ask people to sign in or provide some kind of input to identify them.
Take a real world example of a like button you can implement in say javascript using any server side technology
Whoever install your script will be able to see the button. You may form it with any css or your javascript can simply load an iFrame from your server or append elements to DOM to show this button
When clicked it calls your server with person's info or at least the page url where it was called. For example google analytics uses a unique ID associated with domain url to track visitors.
when you recieve this call you can update your database/storage or anything with the tick mark that button on abc site has been pressed so lets update their likes or dislikes.
If you want your javascript can also increment the number on the same page either before or after updating your server.
When someone else visit that site the script again loads and send a request to your server so you can update the count on page but this time user does not click on like/dislike button so you dont update the record.
You may then show it as a pie chart to user on total visits to their site or page with division in people who liked it and people who did not report back (did not press the button)
If you are still wondering how you can create a button . Use CSS button generator to get one
You must first have a database where you can store various values.
Now, Whenever the user clicks the button, the value of the button stored in the database must be incremented. For this, you will need a backend language which connects you to SQL database.
So whenever the button has clicked the value of the likes in the database changes.
I've been searching for an answer to this and the most I can find is to use window hashchange. However my urls do not contain hashes.
Please note that I do not have any control over the urls or the code for the sites.
So here is what I am doing. I create a drop down button with a few options.
Button A -> Option 1, Option 2, Option 3, etc....
How the site is designed is this. The base url is
http://example.com/12345zzzyyyxxx
To modify anything on that page, you need to click on the edit button. This will take you to the url (which is the edit page)
http://example.com/12345uuuyyyttt/e
As you can see above, 12345 is a constant and anything after that (up to the /e on the second url) is dynamic. But no hashes.
So I am trying to automate the following:
1. Click on Edit
2. Fill in the required fields based on option selected.
3. Save the changes. Once save is triggered, the site will take automatically take you back to /12345zzzyyyxxx base url.
So I have it working from the edit page, but that means you have to manually click on edit. I want to automate that.
I have tried using setTimeout and setInterval to detect when this happens, but what I have found out during debugging is that both of these go out of scope when the frame changes.
Also note that the entire page does not change, the frame changes keeping the logo and a few other items untouched and you can physically see that they stay while the frame changes.
History JS is basically the standard js-lib to handle all History state changes, check their github account for more information.
https://github.com/browserstate/history.js/
Thank you in advance to anyone who attempts to help me with this.
I have a form that I am adding checkboxes to via appendChild() - as selections for the user to chose from - based on a bunch of criteria.
When the user checks any of these boxes and then clicks the 'continue' button to post the selection to another page - and then clicks the back button - the checkboxes that were checked by the user - have now been forgotten by the browser (no longer checked).
If I use php to write the checkboxes or simply have static checkboxes - when the user checks any of these boxes and then clicks the 'continue' button to post the selection to another page - and then clicks the back button - the selected checkboxes are remembered (still checked)
My question is:
Why does the browser forget the selections the user made when I create the checkboxes with appendChild()
yet the same browser will remember the selections the user made when using static checkboxes
What is it about appendChild() that is not allowing the same browser to remember the checked selection?
[div id="mydiv"] here is where the checkboxes are going[div]
[script type="text/javascript"]
var newInput = document.createElement("INPUT");
newInput.id = "mycheckboxid";
newInput.name = "mycheckboxname";
newInput.type = "checkbox";
document.getElementById('mydiv').appendChild(newInput);
[/script]
The browser may "forget" dynamic changes to the DOM because different browsers use different strategies for caching web pages. When you hit the back button, the idea is that the browser can display its cached copy rather than re-request the page from the original web server.
It can accomplish this in (at least) two ways:
The browser caches the DOM itself of a page upon leaving it. Upon revisit (forward or back) dynamic changes will persist.
The browser caches only the original HTML of the page at load time (prior to any dynamic changes). This has the effect of losing those dynamic changes--further modification to the DOM with appendChild() or innerHTML is not recorded.
Note that some browsers additionally keep modified form data, and others do not. If your goal is 99+% compatibility across all browsers, then you have some work to do.
To work around this you need to persist the state somehow. You have a few options:
Save data about the modifications to the page to localstorage. Use a key that is generated randomly on first page load and then kept in the page, so that the state changes will only apply to that instance of the page. On page load, if this key already exists, read the change data out and re-apply the changes. Older browsers do not support local storage.
Do the prior thing with cookies. I don't recommend this, as it has the drawback of proliferating cookies. Cookies are sent and received in every request (including ajax ones), so you would be bloating the data being transmitted on every request. Old browsers would work fine with this.
Abandon your dynamic change model and make the changes occur through a post to the server. Then the page will contain the modified html when pulled from the browser's cache. You probably don't want this, but I thought I'd point it out for completeness' sake.
Save data about the modifications to the page via ajax behind the scenes to the server. This is not the same as actually round-tripping each change like the previous item. You still make changes dynamically, but you post an "advisement" file to the server. Then, on each page load, request any adjustment data from the server. This is similar to the first suggestion, but you are using the remote server as your storage. This makes extra net traffic occur on each page load, but the traffic can be minimal as it would be just about this page. It also makes extra net traffic occur that would not normally be sent (the advisement data). A clever system architecture, however, could use this information to persist a user's unsubmitted form data across computers and over time in a way that could be very handy (lets say your user does 199 out of a 200-question survey and then his power goes out--with this scheme he has a chance of painlessly continuing later exactly where he left off!).
Make your Continue button open a new browser window, preserving the original page intact.
Make your Continue button post the data without leaving the page, preserving it intact. You could do a simple lightbox-style overlay.
If the lightbox-style overlay will not work but you really have to display a new page and don't want it to be in a new window, then redesign your site to work similarly to gmail: where pages change only through javascript, and only through using #hash tags at the end of URLs to control behavior. This can be difficult but there are libraries out there that can accomplish it. (For some browsers one has to resort to polling to see if the hashtag has changed.) The basic idea is that when you click a link that points to the same page but has a tag on it such as About the browser will initiate a page load event, and will push a new context into the history forward/back stack, but will not actually load a new page. You then parse the updated URL for the hash code (which maps to some kind of command) and carry it out. Through careful choice of the proper hash codes for each link, you can hide and display the appropriate page dynamically through Javascript and it will appear as if the person is navigating around a real web site. The reason you do all this is that, because the page never loads, you not only can maintain state in Javascript, you can maintain your DOM state as well--you simply hide the page that was modified by the user, and when the back event occurs that means to visit that page again, you display it, and it is exactly how the user left it. Advantage: If your site requires Javascript to operate, then you are not taking a risk by using even more Javascript to accomplish it. Disadvantage: Completely changing the architecture of your site is a LOT of work and can be difficult to get working on older browsers. To get started with this see Unique URLs. You might try out the jQuery hashchange plugin. If your web site has wide distribution you will want to be sure to address search engine optimization and web usability issues. You may want to see this SO page on detecting back button hash changes.
Use the same strategy as in the prior point but instead of doing it with hashtags, use the new HTML5 history.pushState() and history.replaceState() methods--see Mozilla browser history.
If your goal is not 99% compatibility across 99% of the browsers in use, then please let us know what you are aiming at, as there may be a shortcut possible.
Update: added an option #8
Scripting pages doesn't stop at state management. It includes state management.
This means scripted state changes such as scripted page transitions(pages that internally navigate), content panes, popover menus , style changes and of course, form input and selections are all the responsibility of the scripter.
So, in answer to why .. it is because you did not manage the page state you scripted.
If you want your page to work as you seem to expect you can manage the page state changes you script yourself, use a js lib that manages page, or perhaps in your case form, state, or use the http(s) client/server state management and load up the session state, or in your case just the form state, at the server.
Specifically what I'd like to do is "alter" one of the fields in the Google Calendar field entry for my own purposes. Namely the location is almost always going to be one of four locations, but the way the Google Calendar is set up it doesn't track frequently entered information, and writing the full address every time (or keeping a notefile w/ the 4 addresses to C&P) is kind of annoying.
Ideal I suppose would be an "extension" or script that would automagically detect that I'm filling out a Google Calendar event entry and change the location field to a drop with the four addresses I frequently use as well as an "other" option.
Another possibility might be some kind of bookmarklet (or set of 4) that fills the location field in.
I don't really know where to start or which method would be better (hell, there might well be a third option that is superior).
PS: If this would be easier/more efficiently done in Firefox or some other browser rather than Chrome that is fine as well.
I'd go with bookmarklets. Here's a potential URL for setting addresses given the current Google Calendar page (the id of the "Where" input is ":1u"):
javascript:document.getElementById(':1u').value='123 Some st.'; void(0);
I'd write bookmarks with URLs similar to the above for each of your 4 addresses and then put them into an easily accessible folder, and use them each time you want to populate that address.
UPDATE:
Since the ID changes, you can get it by the class name. However, if the class changes or the number of inputs before the Where field changes, you'll have to update your links:
javascript:document.getElementsByClassName('textinput')[1].value='123 Some st.'; void(0);
UPDATE 2:
Apparently Google doesn't consider the current value of the textbox when a Calendar item is saved. I fixed this by manually firing the 'change' event after the value of the textbox is updated. The following currently works in Firefox:
javascript:var a=document.getElementsByClassName('textinput')[1];a.value='123 Some st.';var e=document.createEvent("HTMLEvents");e.initEvent('change',true,true);a.dispatchEvent(e);void(0);