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Connect the web with language.

Ubiquity is an experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily. It’s a Firefox extension, so it works on Macs, Windows, and Linux.

With only a couple keystrokes, it lets you use language to instruct your browser. You can translate to and from most languages, add maps to your email, edit any page, twitter, check your calendar, search, email your friends, and much more. All without leaving the page you’re on.

See, this is why I like the Internet. Some of you will have heard of Posterous – that funky site where you e-mail them with your pictures, videos and the like, and they just *host* it.

All of it.

Yehr, the lot.

You get to have your own domainname (like mine is jonspriggs.posterous.com) and you can even have it auto-update your blog, your twitter stream, and all sorts (although they still don’t support Laconi.ca… damn you Garry! :) )

But just recently, they said “Here, take this bookmarklet and use it as you will.” so I did. I went http://posterous.com/help/bookmarklet

But I don’t know about you – I’m all for maximising my screen real estate, so I ditched my bookmarks bar ages ago, so now I have to drag my poor mouse all over the screen to get to the button.

In the mean time… I discovered Ubiquity, which is an add-on for Firefox. It’s pretty cool, and it acts like a command line for the web. I was showing off it’s translation skills today with a colleague, and discovered there was a function called create-bookmarklet-command-from, so I put that in, and added “Share on Posterous”… and what do you know, if I now highlight some of the page and hit Ctrl+Space (my shortcut to Ubiquity), I then type share-on-p, it pops up, well, the box I’m currently typing in!

Now, you may think, hangon, he’s *already* dragging his mouse around the screen – why doesn’t he just click on the bookmarklet? That’s a really good question. The answer is, I’m not. Hit F7 and you can turn on the text-mode cursor! So I click once, then Shift and cursor around to highlight my text and then Ctrl+Space share-on-p and then get to write my stuff in here!

Oh, and what does that command actually look like?

CmdUtils.makeBookmarkletCommand({

name: “share-on-posterous”,

url: “javascript:var%20b=document.body;var%20POSTEROUS___bookmarklet_domain=’http://posterous.com’;if(b&&!document.xmlVersion){void(z=document.createElement(‘script’));void(z.type=’text/javascript’);void(z.src=’http://posterous.com/javascripts/bookmarklet2.js’);void(b.appendChild(z));}else{}”

});

Yep, that’s right, four lines of code, two of which just make it a script and one which *names* the script (and yes, if you want, you can rename it here too).

So, it’s all good :)