Wednesday, November 04, 2009

SuperUser.com and WidExplorer

StackOverflow has another site for computer Q&As: Super User. The structure of this site is very similar as StackOverflow. Any user can ask and answer computer related questions, vote Q&As, and make comments. Any user can gain reputations by badges. This is a complementary to StackOverflow's developers site. I, as David.Chu.ca with 163 reputation currently, have asked several questions and answered a few.

Today, I asked a question about using browser to display multiple web sites in one page or tab. This could be done by browser's add-ins or web services. I prefer web services since it is less dependent on browsers. I got some answers, but soon I found a web service doing what I want: a wide view of the web(WE). Basically, the web service has the following features:

  • Search engine: it provides a text field for search. The search results will be a list of google, being, yahoo, wikipedia, youtube and more. The display is one page with wide view of those results.
  • An edit UI for multiple URLs. From there you can enter a list of ULRs and get a wide view of results.
  • Short URLs. Since the view is in one page or tab with a list of results of web sites separated in horizontal view, this browser view has a long URL. At the end of the view (far right side), WE provides a UI for edit URLs and a short or tiny URL for the current view. For example, this tiny URL name(http://tinyurl.com/ybvhcdv) is a view of a list of stocks.


In addition to that, the wide view also provides "-" and "+" to shrink and expand a URL view. The wide view and UIs are based javascript codes on client side so the view is very fast. The only thing is that each URL view has its full width without its own horizontal scroll bar. Another thing is that some empty URL are displayed as expanded mode instead of shrink mode, or empty URLs should not be displayed.

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