December 28, 2004

A cool little feature I've been using on other projects and will soon will be adding here

Query Links on the Web

In response to Bob DuCharme's latest post here is one method of one-to-many linking that I started using in a clients project and plan to start implementing on this site as well as use it as a major feature in a reference project soon to be released.

The idea is to simply use a XML definition file that has a particular phrase, word, object, person, or web site reference to search for in an antry and subsequently add a pop-up list of possible links associated with this match. For example, to showcase all of the...

[NOTE: In going through this there are some obvious issues that come when taking code from a system built in 100% client-side XSLT and another that is not. e.g. difficulty in creating dynamic CSS entries using movable type without adding in a bunch of additional code. For this example I'll hold off and let the concept speak for itself and showcase the correct usage at a later date when I launch the project this code was built for and subsequently torn out of for this post sample]

x2x2x.org project sites in my entry I would simply put <x2x2x/> and, when processed by the XSLT processor before being posted would match the element tags name to the definition file and then list all the links in a pop-up activated when clicking what seems to be just a simple link. So by clicking [update: this is working in IE but there seems to be a problem with IE in which I am fixin now][update:fixed]

Shows all of the available x2x2x.org links. And by adding the <last-5-posts/> to the xml definition file for that page will insert this link:

... in which when clicked will showcase the last 5 posts on this blog. Of course given that the XML and XSL are still located on the server as the files on the server change the links on the site change keeping the client up to date with the latest changes even though he or she may not have visited the site any time in recent history.

You can view source to get the code for this if interested otherwise I will do a more thourough entry tomorrow with a detail tutorial on how to implement this functionality on your site.

Cheers!