The URL of Submittingham
April 3, 2006 5:23 PM Subscribe
What is a good web site UI method to allow users to submit a URL?
As a learning excercise, I'm building a web app that is a gift registry. People can build their wishlist and others can anonymously check things off of it... just like the registry systems deployed by Target, et al.
What I need help with is facilitating the process the user has to go through to add an item to their wishlist, specifically, entering the URL to an item on a different site. I'm sure most of you could manage to copy and paste the URL of an Amazon product detail page into my form, but my mother wouldn't be able to do this.
I started to build a frame based "surf and capture" system where the top frame has a "capture" button and the user can surf in the bottom frame until they have the product up. When they hit the "capture" button the javascript grabs the URL of the lower window and sticks it in the form on another page. Unfortunately, that kind of cross site scripting seems to only be allowed in Safari.
Short of giving a little lesson what and where a URL is and how to copy and paste it into a form, how can I facilitate this process?
I'm using AJAX elsewhere in the app, so javascript solutions are OK.
As a learning excercise, I'm building a web app that is a gift registry. People can build their wishlist and others can anonymously check things off of it... just like the registry systems deployed by Target, et al.
What I need help with is facilitating the process the user has to go through to add an item to their wishlist, specifically, entering the URL to an item on a different site. I'm sure most of you could manage to copy and paste the URL of an Amazon product detail page into my form, but my mother wouldn't be able to do this.
I started to build a frame based "surf and capture" system where the top frame has a "capture" button and the user can surf in the bottom frame until they have the product up. When they hit the "capture" button the javascript grabs the URL of the lower window and sticks it in the form on another page. Unfortunately, that kind of cross site scripting seems to only be allowed in Safari.
Short of giving a little lesson what and where a URL is and how to copy and paste it into a form, how can I facilitate this process?
I'm using AJAX elsewhere in the app, so javascript solutions are OK.
Response by poster: Hmm. Interesting idea Mendel. I'll have to check that out. So the user saves the bookmarklet from my page and it's titled, say, "Add To My Wishlist" and when they call it later while surfing Amazon, it sends the current URL to my database? Interesting. Thanks!
posted by nonmyopicdave at 5:48 PM on April 3, 2006
posted by nonmyopicdave at 5:48 PM on April 3, 2006
You might want to take a look at how some of the meta-registries linked here handle this.
Also, keep in mind that people are probably going to need to be at least vaguely URL-savvy in order to use your app successfully; my guess is that you'd end up with a lot of submitted URLs for POSTed form pages (search results, etc.) or cookie-driven sites that will end up being meaningless outside of their original context.
posted by staggernation at 6:25 AM on April 4, 2006
Also, keep in mind that people are probably going to need to be at least vaguely URL-savvy in order to use your app successfully; my guess is that you'd end up with a lot of submitted URLs for POSTed form pages (search results, etc.) or cookie-driven sites that will end up being meaningless outside of their original context.
posted by staggernation at 6:25 AM on April 4, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by mendel at 5:39 PM on April 3, 2006