wdrury's dashboard

I'm sorry you're having a problem, and thank you for the version information.

So did it manage to install itself properly? Does it show "Clickable on" or "Clickable off" in the bottom status bar? What happens when you select some text ... does it pop up?

So Tim's idea is that instead of having fixed buttons on the popup (currently, they are Amazon, Wikipedia, Google, Dictionary, and WebClipboard), users could select their own services (Ask.com instead of Google, Flikr instead of Dictionary, etc) to have in their own personal widget.

When we were first looking at ideas, we found HyperWords.net, a similar sort of add-on with many (MANY) features ... cascading menus of options to do everything from translating text to converting currencies, etc. In a sense, we defined the project in opposition to their "everything and the kitchen sink" approach ... instead of more options, we would consciously have fewer.

In fact, the question I have been asking has been: is even a five option set too large? Maybe the real killer feature is simply the clipboard, and the rest of it is unnecessary. On the other hand, I do tend to use the Wikipedia and Dictionary links quite a bit, and Google when I highlight an address (Google Maps is usually the first result).

Perhaps we could limit it to Clipboard plus 4 other buttons, and offer a bunch of alternative options for the 4 "free form" buttons. While most people would likely simply use the defaults, there might be some who feel so strongly about Ask.com or Barnes & Noble that they would not use us without this feature.

I am definitely interested in hearing what other people think about this. If you have a chance, you could read the 37 Signals free eBook Getting Real, which informs my attitude on the subject.

I have seen this happen a couple of times. I was able to recreate it this way, which I think is an instance of the same problem:

1. Select text on any page (not just google).
2. Right click on the page (as many times as you want).

The popup follows you around. This is because RIGHT clicking does not un-select the text. Cl.ickable hears a mouseup event, sees that there is text selected, and thinks it should wake up (southeast of the mouse position).

Firefox does not have an "onselect" event that I am aware of, so I might have to do something trickier (perhaps remembering the "dismiss" action and not waking up if the selected text has not changed since dismiss was last clicked).

I think this one has a very good chance ... it is simple, allows you to add more context to the clip, and adds more words that we could eventually search on (supposing, of course, that we have a search function.

I'd like to make sure we make sure that the interface is lightweight and pretty simple, there are probably going to be quite a few things you can do with/to a clip, but I'd hate for clips to be overwhelmed by all of the icons and tools around them.

Having a place where you can just click and start typing without leaving the page, along with an Ajax-y auto-save function, would be pretty slick, and would only expand if the comment itself started to get long.

I suppose we could also limit the comments to an arbitrary, Twitter-like length. Or they could serve double duty as "tags", rather than having a separate "tags" field, although "tags" are often used more as "categories".

Thoughts?

If you did allow a longer editing window, perhaps you could archive the previous versions, and show modifications (by displaying the previous text with a line through it, perhaps) ... I've seen wired.com and slate.com use this to good effect. It gives context to comments that refer to an earlier version of the post.

Speaking of a longer editing window, could the "Leave a comment" textarea be more than two lines tall? :) – wdrury, on September 11, 2008 00:32

Not only is the error message cryptic, but the "domain" that was invalid (which on the form is called "URL") was HIDDEN until the user clicks on the "company name" field again.

So (a) you HAVE to make those error message intelligible; and
(b) *highlight* the problem area, rather than hiding it. :)

The similar message "Domain has already been taken" also needs fixing. – wdrury, on September 10, 2008 21:23