Bradford Knows!

Widgets » Bradford Knows!

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by johnnysaucepn

V1.1 Apr 15, 2006 9:53:45 PM

What does Bradford Know? He's a cousin to the server monkeys, and knows much of the lost corners of the web.

Feed a URL into his mouth and he'll come back with all sorts of things he knows about connected with what's on that page. Other pages, books, DVDs, games, Wikipedia entries, Flickr photos, foreign languages. And he's not just user-friendly, he's user-adorable!

As a side note, this is my first widget that's seriously AJAX-heavy, with a totally asynchronous architecture. It also marks my first real foray into SVG, including DOM scripting of SVG.

Warning: there appears to be a minor bug in the weekly versions of O9 - some pages are unavailable for querying unless you switch Automatic Redirection OFF. I'll update the widget when this bug is fixed.

Comments 7 posts

1 - 7 of 7

Bradford goes international!

http://my.opera.com/johnnysaucepn/blog/show.dml/232507

By johnnysaucepn, # Apr 25, 2006 1:04:03 PM

Bradford wanted to translate my Finnish home page from English to German. The results were not so good. But he's so cute that I really can't blame him

By Vakio, # Apr 20, 2006 7:05:17 PM

For someone like me, with no artistic ability, SVG is a godsend. It lets you describe graphics instead of drawing them, making them a lot easier to tweak. Plus you can rip cool bits out of other people's graphics and use them. Which I would encourage people to do if you like any of it.

By johnnysaucepn, # Apr 18, 2006 4:33:17 PM

Whoah, that interface is astonishing! It does not seem to be of much real-life purpose, but it looks beautiful.

By hermen2048, # Apr 18, 2006 4:01:36 PM

Okay, v1.1 is out, I've updated the code a bit to include the smarter matching I mentioned. You should get more relevant (or at least interesting) matches now. Oddly enough, it still picks out 'lot', darn monkey has a mind of his own... (Actually, it's because it appears a couple of times, Yahoo! seems to think it's significant.)

By johnnysaucepn, # Apr 17, 2006 4:38:02 PM

Yeah, I need to make him more selective and intelligent in the next version, like prioritising meta-tag keywords and stripping out javascript and CSS code. Some keywords come from Yahoo! user tagging, perhaps someone somewhere has tagged your page as 'lot' for some bizarre reason?

I am quite proud of the SVG actually, thanks for noticing! I can't take credit for the shiny effects, it was a example filter from www.zvon.org.

Creating the grabbers was okay, once the request framework was in place. He keeps looking for data while he's telling you about things, and the grabbers hook into that basic system.

By johnnysaucepn, # Apr 16, 2006 0:51:44 AM

Sometimes the thought bubble is too small to contain all the text Bradford finds. Also, sometimes he picks up on really strange word choices like "lot", which he found on my website. "Lot"? :?

Is the whole monkey head drawn in SVG or just the eyes? Either way that's some nice shiny shiny there

EDIT: It *is* the whole head! And the thought bubble! That's quite incredible