The “Novels in Three Lines” project on Twitter has been talked about a lot in the last couple of weeks - both on blogs as well as over Twitter itself. Some highlights:

• @Twitch: novelsin3lines - the second twitter feed worth following, the first being the Mars rover. Everyone else can go to hell.
• @Condalmo: Blast from the past: “Burning with electoral fervor”
• @Phil Gyford: Very much enjoying Félix Fénénon’s Twitters from 1906 Paris
• @gabrielle: I think @novelsin3lines will be an excellent time waster!
• @itsrob: favorite new twitter user
• @rossh: just to share, @novelsin3lines is really pretty awesome.
• @Mica Scalin: Very excited to follow @novelsin3lines great idea!
• @Dave Mason: I am completely digging @novelsin3lines
• @jenks: someone turned novelsin3lines into a twitter account. Cool idea for a really cool book.
• Noah Brier: My friend Naveen announced a new side project [...]
• ReadWriteWeb: From Félix Fénéon, these tweets are the “poems and novels and novels he never otherwise wrote.” [sic]
• Le Monde: J’y remarque pour commencer, bien sûr, une traduction du merveilleux Félix Fénéon … comme quoi… nous n’inventons rien en ce début de 21ème siècle… ne manqueront pas de dire les plus sceptiques. Et voici d’où semble être venue l’idée de le reprendre .
• Media Bistro: “It’s a brilliant idea,” NYRB managing editor Sara Kramer told me when I emailed her looking for the backstory. “I only wish we had thought of it.”

You can use Twitter search to find more people who are talking about “Novels”.

An alpha version of Ubiquity just came out of Mozilla Labs. It’s a Quicksilver-like add-on for Firefox that allows you to quickly launch favorite sites and chain together actions. Aza and gang have put together a powerful toolkit. I particularly like the idea of scripting together various actions and being able to modify content inside a page. (For example, see the TinyURL command).

As I was reading about Ubiquity, I couldn’t help but smile. I’ve been using a very rudimentary version of a similar setup for a few years now. A while ago, frustrated with having to load up individual pages and add-ons for common tasks, I pieced together quick launch system using bookmarklets and Firefox’s keywords support. I’ve been wanting to share these hacks and even though Ubiquity now captures all of these elements quite nicely, I figured now is a good time as any to do that.

Some basics

First off, any time you bookmark a URL in Firefox, it will give you the ability to attach a “keyword” to the bookmark. Once you’ve saved a bookmark, edit the entry using Bookmarks Manager (Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks) and fill in the “keyword” field. I usually pick a short keyword such as “map” for Google Maps and “t” for Twitter and “g” for Google. The keyword can be used as a shortcut in the browser’s address bar. For instance, if you chose a keyword “home” for the bookmark to your homepage, you can type just “home” into your address bar and you’ll be redirected to your page. If you have a keyword “g” for Google, all you have to do is to type the letter “g” into the address bar to be taken to Google.

But what if you want to combine this keyword with a search term? This could be particularly useful in the Google example above. The second step is to get the bookmark URL to respond dynamically to any searches you might want to do. You can get Firefox to dynamically fill-in a URL with text of your choice by using the “%s” substitution token. For instance, let’s say I’d like to be able to quickly search for something on Google. I can use the keyword “g” followed by my search text in the address bar to search Google for that term. To do this, I’d bookmark the URL “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s“. When used alongside the keyword, Firefox will automatically substitute “%s” with my search text and will show Google’s search results for that term.

Examples

These are some of the most-used shortcuts I’ve put together, along with the keywords I use:

Action: Find something on Google
Keyword: g
URL: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s

Action: Find something on Yelp
Keyword: y
URL: http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=%s&find_loc=New+York%2C+NY

Action: Map an address on Google Maps
Keyword: l
URL: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s

Action: Find something on Hype Machine
Keyword: h
URL: http://hypem.com/search/%s/1/

Action: Quickly add current page to del.icio.us
Keyword: da
URL: javascript:(function(){l=location.href;t=document.title;if(!t) t = prompt('title:');tags=prompt('tags:');location.href='https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?url='+escape(l)+'&description='+escape(t)+'&tags='+escape(tags);})()
Notes: This will prompt you for tags (space-separated).

Action: Quickly add current page to del.icio.us (with notes)
Keyword: das
URL: javascript:(function(){l=location.href;t=document.title;if(!t) t = prompt('title:');s=prompt('notes:');tags=prompt('tags:');location.href='https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/add?url='+escape(l)+'&description='+escape(t)+'&extended='+escape(s)+'&tags='+escape(tags);})()
Notes: This will prompt you for tags and will ask you to fill in the notes field.

Action: Twitter something
Keyword: t
URL: [links to script on my system that automatically authenticates and posts to Twitter. see below for more]

Some notes

I started using these hacks mainly because I was tired of using heavier bookmarklets and popups to perform simple tasks. For instance, the del.icio.us posting bookmarklet is very lightweight in that you don’t have to download meta-data (tags, etc) from del.icio.us before you post a URL. It’s also easy to use these same bookmarklets in other browsers - I use the del.icio.us hints on my iPhone to quickly save things when on the go. As you can tell, this is a very simple system. One of the major drawbacks (which Ubiquity improves upon) is that bookmarklets/keywords only allow you to perform “GET” requests (”POST” is not allowed). This is the reason I had to write up a separate script to provide the ability to post to Twitter. Ubiquity allows you to perform all sorts of network connections using jQuery (including AJAX calls). On the other hand, one of the issues with Ubiquity (which is easily configurable in my keyword-based setup) is the use of custom keywords. For example, I might prefer using “f” for FriendFeed updates. Someone else may want to use “f” for Facebook. From a command development standpoint, who will get first choice on a keyword like “ebay”? It will be interesting to see how this namespace issue is handled.

Porting keywords to Ubiquity

I took a few minutes to create the Ubiquity del.icio.us “quick add” bookmarklet - it’s essentially a straight port of my simple keyword-based bookmarklet from above. I’m going to start moving a few other browser hacks into Ubiquity as well in the coming days.

Feel free to browse and subscribe to my collection of Ubiquity commands.

Félix Fénéon:

Scratching himself with a revolver with an overly sensitive trigger, M. Édouard B. removed the tip of his nose in the Vivienne precinct house.

Bonnaut, a locksmith in Montreuil, was chatting on his doorstep when the gangster called Shoe Face struck him twice with a knife.

Novels in Three Lines is a collection of more than a thousand anonymously-published blurbs that appeared in the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. They were all penned by Félix Fénéon who worked as a clerk in the French War Department. Luc Sante, the translator, describes Félix and his “novels”:

They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote, or at least did not publish or preserve. They demonstrate in miniature his epigrammatic flair, his exquisite timing, his pinpoint precision of language, his exceedingly dry humor, his calculated effrontery, his tenderness and cruelty, his contained outrage [...] They depict the France of 1906 in its full breadth, on a canvas of reduced scale but proportionate vastness. They might be considered Fénéon’s Human Comedy.

My friend Kio and I thought it was a perfect narrative to bring to Twitter. She talked to a friend at NYRB (the publisher) and got permission to reprint the text in serial form over Twitter. NYRB are quite excited about it.

You can follow Novels in Three Lines on Twitter at ‘novelsin3lines‘. I suggest tracking it directly using your phone for best results. We’ve agreed to do two updates per day: once at 9am (EST) in the morning like a newspaper and once at 9pm (EST) at night to give you something to smile/talk about with your friends when you’re about town.