[Web4lib] Proxifier bookmarklet -- too risky?

[Turner,Kathleen]

Keith,
 
One of our resident wizards created a "linkmaker" for our faculty to use for this function:  http://www.library.drexel.edu/resources/urltester/urlmaker.php   It collects contact info and the url into a small database so that we know who to contact if something goes haywire with a specific link (i.e., we get calls from students that it doesn't work).  
 
Generally, it works pretty well -- biggest problem, as you might expect, is letting faculty know it's there, and getting them to use it.
 
Kathleen
 
Web Editor/Education Librarian
W.W. Hagerty Library
Drexel University
khturner at drexel.edu

________________________________

From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org on behalf of Keith D. Engwall
Sent: Wed 8/9/2006 1:39 PM
To: web4lib
Subject: RE: [Web4lib] Proxifier bookmarklet -- too risky?



Thanks to all for the responses.  I do not believe our campus currently supports VPN, but it's worth asking about.  I also agree with Ross that it needs to be more user friendly, and I like the idea of spitting back a proxified URL (since Faculty will no doubt want to put these URLs in Blackboard and the like).

Now that I feel more comfortable with the idea, I may dedicate more development cycles to it. In the meantime, for those who are interested, here is the script (all one line):

<a href='javascript:void(str=prompt("Your%20Prompt%20Here:",""));if(str){location.href="http://your.proxy.server/proxy/path?url="+str;}'>Link</a>

Note that different types of bookmarklets may require processing on the string (str), such as escaping (which translates non-alpha-numeric characters into escape codes, such as %20 for spaces).  In this case, because the string (str) is itself a URL, the string needs to *not* be escaped.

You would put the above code on a web page with instructions telling the user to right-click the link and save it as a bookmark.

I created my bookmarklet under the guidance of the following site:

http://www.webreference.com/js/column35/index.html

It has samples about six pages in.  That is worth looking at for other bookmarklet applications, such as searching.

You should be able to access our test bookmarklet on our dev site:

http://libwebdev.catawba.edu/gadgets.php

Cheers!

Keith

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org]
Sent: Wednesday, August 09, 2006 10:37 AM
To: web4lib
Subject: RE: [Web4lib] Proxifier bookmarklet -- too risky?

Does your campus support VPN?  If your proxy server requires authentication (which I would hope it does, otherwise you're giving the internet access to your resources) AND you need to set up specific URLs to work with it AND you need to post a page with the properly munged links, it might be easier to simply ask that your faculty connect to a VPN.  That way all of their links would work *almost* seamlessly.

(I know with some VPN clients you can have it connect automatically if it detects it's trying to access a certain domain - thus if a faculty member tries to access "library.catawba.edu", the VPN could kick in and connect them automatically.)

Just a thought.
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