Mark Pilgrim has radically transformed MagicLine into MonkeyDo, a new kind of “browsing assistant” that guesses what kind of page you’re on and offers to post it to your personal del.icio.us bookmarks log with the appropriate tags.
I’m not sure he’d agree that there’s a line connecting the dots of MagicLine and MonkeyDo — you can see his attached description for clarification — but I see them both as ways to “evacuate” data detected while surfing to a semi-stable remote store, for eventual reuse such as filling out forms.
His package also includes a ridiculously useful — as in ridiculously 1) complicated and 2) annoyingly absent from the DOM — subroutine that ‘uninherits’ all cascaded style sheets (though Aaron Boodman followed up with an alternative CSS reset technique).
Mark Pilgrim announces MonkeyDo
Think of it as Clippy the Useless Office Assistant, only for the web,
and actually useful. (I actually considered naming it Cl.ip.py, but thought better of it.) It sits in the background and watches as you browse, and if it recognizes a type of page that you consider interesting (as defined in Tools –> User Script Commands –> MonkeyDo options), it will offer to post it to del.icio.us. Or if you prefer, you can tell it to automatically post certain types of pages, and it will simply notify you when it has done so.The heuristic for identifying different types of pages is, of course, somewhat messy, and will inevitably lead to embarrassingly hilarious mis-identification, which someone will no doubt bring to my attention.
Mark’s announcement of MagicLine
It tracks your browsing and collects
– page URLs
– page titles
– referrers
– Author, description, keywords from meta tags
– Technorati tags from rel=”tag” links
– XFN links
– autodiscovered RSS/Atom feeds
– autodiscovered FOAF filesThen you can press Control + Shift + L anywhere to get the MagicLine prompt. Start typing, and it autocompletes based on all the data it’s collected so far.