This is a circuitous tale, but stick with it – it gets interesting towards the end.
I noticed that I hadn’t seen any new entries from DJ’s blog on Bloglines for a while so I investigated and found that the feed I was subscribed to was dead. Another bit of poking around and I found a newer and better one.
So then I started catching up on all the interesting stuff that I had missed out on. I was particularly interested in this piece about Mozilla’s site navigation toolbar. Now I’ve been using <link rel=”next” …/> in web pages for a while, but I’ve never actually seen what they can do in a browser.
A bit of Googling and I found that the site navigation bar isn’t part of the default Firefox installation, but that it’s available as an extension. Which I, of course, downloaded and installed.
It adds a new little toolbar in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. As expected it has buttons to go to the first and last as well as the previous and next pages in a sequence. But it also has buttons to go “up a level” and to the “top level” of a web site. It looks like it guesses these from the URL of the current page.
But most interesting button is the last one. It’s there to show “related pages” and it seems that the extension contains some heuristics to extract links from the web page and group them in various ways. If you’ve got it installed, take a look at what it does with Simon Waldman’s homepage.
There are still a few problems. Any link containing words like “first” or “previous” are automatically assumed to be a related page (even if there’s also a <link rel=”previous” …/> tag. But those heuristics can be turned off.
I need to do some experiments to see exactly how to get the best out of it, but it certainly looks interesting. And another good reason not to use Internet Explorer.