Only connect

Here's a project for the LazyWeb: the three programs that I use most for text processing (Word, Entourage, and text input fields in my browser, which is currently Chimera) are all weak-to-useless when it comes to adding ordinary links to text. Most of the time, I find myself switching windows, selecting a URL, copying it to the clipboard, switching back to my document, and then typing out the href tag and pasting in the URL. 99% of the time, I'm pointing to a URL that I've visited in the last thirty minutes.

So what I'd love to see is a little service, like CopyPaste, available to any application, that keeps track of the last 25 URLs you've visited. Anytime you're working with text in any application, you select a string of words, hit a special key combination, and a list of recent URLs appears. Select one, and it automatically formats your HTML link for you. I'd use that service dozens of times a day. Maybe there's something out there that will do this already?

Comments

[Adam Rice]

I'm with you. I've created a macro in Youpi key that'll create an anchor tag with the clipboard contents as the link, the closing tag, and then back up four spaces. Not perfect, but it helps. With a little more work, it should be possible to get the URL and title of the frontmost browser window and paste that as a link.

[Scott Rosenberg]

Any decent text editor (BBEdit on macs or I use Ultraedit on PC) should be able to let you do a macro that will, with one keystroke, take any highlighted text and encase it with anchor tags linked to whatever URL you have in your clipboard. (For this to work really well the text editor needs to support multiple clipboards so you can sock away the highlighted text while you are building the anchor tag). This doesn't get you exactly where you want to be but it gets you most of the way there!

[Justin Hall]

Yes, better talking across applications, better information sharing of state and parsing objects of attention. I have been Amazed at Movable Type for this, frankly, I notice you're using it - have you tried BookMarkLets? That is offered from the front page, the first menu of your StevenBerlinJohnson web site. And so, with a BookMarkLet - you highlight some text on a page, text that is something you wish to write about on your blog, and then you open this BookMarkLet and that text is made into a quote, with the URL and title of the page HTMLed nearby. It's not your Word Processor, but it's possible to spend about all day with the Word Processor of Movable Type lickedy-click all the text and links you want to share between your fingers your mind and the rest of the world - easy. Maybe this Movable Type thing can be engineered backwards for book writing?