Tourl -- my app to quickly save page URL, title and tags to .url

[Nod5]

I'm currently rewriting my own small app for saving web page URLs, titles and some tags to separate .url files. I use it to replace the internal favorite/bookmark handling in Maxthon and Firefox. The app speeds up my bookmarking a lot. It's designed for use with a small number of tags (up to nine plus date, domain name etcetera) and has some intuitive hotkeys. Today I wanted to practice on making a screencast in Wink so I made a small animation of how the bookmarking app looks and operates, hopefully pretty selfexplanatory: http://nod5.dcmembers.com/tourlcast.html

Would anyone else here have use for this? The code is currently very messy and specific to my system but if others are interested in it then I'll try to clean it up and release it in some way, when I have time.

edit: See reply #7 for a download link and more information on the finished program, https://www.donation...57.msg88324#msg88324

edit: changed thread title from "my app to quickly save page URL, title and tags to .url -- anyone interested?"
edit2: changed screencast link

[mouser]

that is *extremely* cool.
the demo video is very helpful by the way.

yes i want it 

ps.
this is one of those things that there are certain people who would really love this, but it will be hard for them to find your tool or know where to look.  you should make alittle web page for it that people can find while searching, and maybe make a pad file for it, etc.

[nite_monkey]

it sounds cool and all, but what does the AA BB CC DD and what not do? I would like to download it and see how cool it is.

[mouser]

as i understand it, those are the sample configured keywords, which get stored with the bookmark.
so the tool provides a very quick way to add from a specific set of keywords when you save it.
very useful if for example you were doing research and wanted to quickly tag urls from a set of keywords.

[nite_monkey]

that makes sense. That would be a useful feature.

[justice]

What's great about these is that u can find them using FARR too, as all the information are in the filenames. or indexed by locate.

[Nod5]

I'm glad that there was some interest in this! Then I'll clean it and put it up . This weekend some time.

nite_monkey, yes mouser is describing things correctly. The tags I regularly use are in swedish so I thought an international nonsense language (AA, BB...) would be less confusing. The .ini file at the end of the animation shows what tags/parameters in the GUI the user can change.

[Nod5]

Tourl version 071129     edit: latest version is 080217, see Reply #8 below
Tourl is a small tool that let's you quickly save URLs to individual .url files with tagging and file name customizing easily done through intuitive hotkeys or mouseclicks.
Tourl is free for non-commercial use (but donations are welcome). For commercial use please contact me, Nod5.
Tourl is the first "real" program I have made. All feedback will be greatly appreciated.

How to download:
The .zip file attached to this post contains the compiled tourl.exe (md5 = 952a3502c62e41c9075c59d2b69a25c6) and the source code tourl.ahk (md5 =  475d760aeffa524859e6d32bd855fd8b)

How Tourl works:
- Call tourl through a hotkey (CTRL+SHIFT+A) and a small GUI pops up if a browser is active (supports Firefox, Maxthon1/2, iexplorer6/7 so far)
- Tourl grabs the window title and URL from the active browser window
- Tourls puts "windowtitle YYMMDD" as default in its editbox
- Tourl lists various tags (as text buttons) in the GUI:
 - date/time (YYMMDD, YYMMDD-HHMMSS)
 - url-derivates (site, site.com, site.com_blog_post1_comment1)
 - page title
 - up to 9 special user specified tags (3 to 4 letters long, tags in CAPS are changed to lowercase in the filename, except for tag number 9)
- 3 user specified text buttons at the bottom right for saving a .url (named after the string in the editbox) to different user specified directories
- a screencast showing Tourl in use is available here: http://nod5.dcmembers.com/tourlcast.html

Mouse control:
- Right/left clicking on a tag adds it as suffix/prefix to the text in the editbox
- Right/left clicking on an empty area clears the entire suffix/prefix
- Middle clicking anywhere toggles the editbox contents between "windowtitle YYMMDD", "windowtitle", "" (empty)

Hotkey control:
 Tourl has hotkeys on the left part of the keyboard that the hand will find without looking and by moving only fingers, not hand position.
- CTRL+SHIFT+A: open/close tourl  (The rest of the hotkeys only work when tourl is active)
- CTRL+A S D F: add tag1 2 3 4 as prefix
- CTRL+A has special features: when tapped multiple times rapidly (<500ms) it toggles over tag1 - 9
- CTRL+CAPSLOCK: add YYMMDD as prefix
- CTRL+Z or <: add tag9 as suffix
- CTRL+Q: toggles the editbox contents between "windowtitle YYMMDD", "windowtitle", (empty)
- ENTER: saves the URL with the current editbox string as .url file name in the default target directory (target3, underlined in the GUI)

Additional features:
- avoids duplicate tags. An already added tag is removed/moved on second attempt to add it
 example1: adding prefix "tag1" to the current "tag1 _________" results in "_________" (= tag1 is removed)
 example2: adding suffix "tag1" to the current "tag1 _________" results in "_________ tag1" (= tag1 is moved to the suffix)
- automatically creates tourl.ini file. Edit its 9 tags and 3 directory names/paths to fit your needs.
- lists the number of characters in the editbox string in gray text below the editbox
- before saving the .url file, tourl checks if the full filename path is too long (over 256 characters). If it is, tourl flashes the total path lenght in red, stays open and does not attempt to save the file
- asks before overwriting a .url file

Possible future features:
- site specific conversions through regexp, configurable in the .ini file
example: the site boingboing.net use this page title format "__sometitle___ - Boing Boing". In my personal version of this app I use regexp to automatically change that to "boingboing __sometitle___" directly when tourl is called. The same can be done for other sites. For example a "DC" prefix could be added to the title when calling tourl for a donationcoder.com page. At the moment, I don't know how to easily implement customization of this through the .ini file.
- call tourl when Windows Explorer is active to list the first selected file's name which can then be renamed or copied through basically the same GUI interface.
- link tourl to some screengrabbing tool so that after constructing the filename and saving the .url, tourl can optionally (if CTRL+ENTER was pressed for example) send command line arguments to save a screencap of the page using the filename tourl has constructed for the screencap image file.

edit 080331: removed attachment, get latest tourl at http://nod5.dcmembers.com/tourl.html

[Nod5]

Tourl version 080217
The .zip file attached to this post contains
the compiled tourl.exe (md5 = dfc0b825750d78efe1146afd06ef532a)
the source code tourl.ahk (md5 = 36aab907237edce66a60d0a5f49f874b)

changelog:   - Added instruction for editing and compiling tourl.ahk to do site specific title replacement actions

Read "tourl_replacement_actions_instruction.txt" for details.
The .txt has replacement action code for: donationcoder , boingboing, askmetafilter, wikipedia
If you write some useful replacement actions then please post them to this thread! 

edit 080331: removed attachment, get latest tourl at http://nod5.dcmembers.com/tourl.html

[Nod5]

Tourl version 080316
changelog:
- trims all forbidden characters from editbox text before saving .url
- shows messagebox if error while saving
- updated tourl_replacement_actions_instruction.txt

Tourl can now be downloaded at http://nod5.dcmembers.com/tourl.html

Can someone with Vista tell me if Tourl works as it should there?