Current location: Brighton, UK

I Can Haz Awesome

Posted on Tuesday, October 07, 2008 @ 16:55 CET

While in Brighton during Flash on the Beach I got to hang out with David Stone, aka @builtbydave as I knew him, who along with Josh Russell are the guys behind icanhaz.com. If you haven't used iCanHaz its like TinyURL or bit.ly on steroids.

So lets start at the top, TinyURL is great because it creates, ahem, tiny URLs from long ass ones. So the URL to your Google Maps search for Oslo may be http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=oslo&ie=UTF8&z=9&iwloc=addr, but if you were gonna post that to Twitter you'd run out of characters fast. Using TinyURL you can convert that same link to http://tinyurl.com/3r4wmy. Pretty cool and bit.ly does the same thing, except it accepts norwegian characters too while TinyURL seems to choke on these.

All well and good but the code after http://tinyurl.com/ is hardly memorable. Enter iCanHaz. If I want to make a tiny URL to http://paulofierro.com I can use http://tinyurl.com/4lx94j, but with iCanHaz I can have http://icanhaz.com/paulo. How cool is that? And easier to remember too.

The length of those is pretty close though so its not that much of a time saver. But this is where iCanHaz reveals its true power. Try http://icanhaz.com/google/kittens or http://icanhaz.com/w/Calculus. The first one searches Google for kittens and the second link searches Wikipedia for Calculus. Ok, you can already do this your browser's search bar but that's not the cool part, iCanHaz supports dynamic parameters!

This means you can set up your own custom dynamic URLs. For example, if you want to search this blog for posts on "flex" you have to do the following:

  1. goto http://paulofierro.com
  2. type "flex" into search box
  3. hit search

Or simply goto http://icanhaz.com/paulo/flex. To search Seb's blog for "papervision" posts, simply goto http://icanhaz.com/seb/papervision. I think that's pretty sweet :)

Setting up your own is simple:

  1. goto http://icanhaz.com
  2. set up a link to your site first, just in case people don't want to do a search, so point http://icanhaz.com/yoursite to http://www.yoursite.com/
  3. find out how the search works on your site. It might be yoursite.com/?q=XXX or yoursite.com/cgi-bin/search.pl?XXX, etc where XXX is the search term
  4. now forward http://icanhaz.com/yoursite/%s to http://yoursite.com/?q=%s (if that's how your search works)

To test that I remembered this correctly I forwarded http://icanhaz.com/flashmag/%s to http://www.google.com/custom?domains=www.flashmagazine.com&q=%s&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&client=pub-1013303726815967&forid=1&sitesearch=www.flashmagazine.com&channel=5419954328&ie=ISO-8859-1&oe=ISO-8859-1&flav=0000&sig=-b0bDMPNCXP_y3ci&cof=.... etc, etc, etc

Phew. So to search FlashMagazine for Away3D posts, you can simply go to http://icanhaz.com/flashmag/away3d.

And this is only search.

As far as I know it only accepts one parameter at the moment and you need to drop your email address in case you want to edit the URL it points to at a later date since this is still a manual process but its still damn cool.

So here's a short list of iCanHaz tips Dave showed me:

Yup, Skype support. It does this by using the skype:// pseudo-protocol which works if you have Skype installed.

I was telling Dave how this was awesome because the link to Mike Chamber's Flash Platform Community Chat™ used a long XMPP URL (xmpp:flashplatform_chat@conference.mikechambers.com?join) which you could use to join via a chat app that supported XMPP like Adium. At the time there was no support for it but a few minutes later Dave set it up and now iCanHaz does XMPP so to join the chat simply goto http://icanhaz.com/flashchat.

I also made /file/XXX. That displays a simple page with a link to the file so you can right-click to save it. Its kinda useful from time to time.

Anyways, that's it for me. If you have more tips please drop them in the comments and if you like iCanHaz join the Facebook fan club.

- paulo

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