IMS_Blog

The vaguely live maps just made me sit watching and making happy little sounds—I think this may be some sort of online heaven to me. I seem to be something of a train buff without realising (hey, it’s in the family) and I’ve always loved maps, so marry the two… I could sit watching the trains moving all day (if only Showcase updated its thumbnails with the changing map…suppose I could just open a load of browser windows and tile those).

While the maps make me go “oooohhhhhh” the most practical thing is the wonderful simplicity of a hackable URL. This just means you can go to somewhere like http://www.traintimes.org.uk/newcastle/york/18:30 for trains from newcastle to york at 18:30. Then I got carried away (I was waiting for Torchwood to come on you see…) I thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could type “trains from newcastle to york at 18:30” into the browser address bar and have it work? Well, I’m running Firefox so now I can :-) Some explanation….

I wrote a bookmarklet, made possible by a couple of cool things. Firefox supports keywords and, importantly, keyword searches. It doesn’t matter if that bookmark happens to be a bit of javascript which does something quite different with the parameters than form a traditional search URL (when I wrote this I just hacked it together without looking anything up…I wasn’t even sure you could pass the parameters to javascript until I tried. There are actually a few examples of doing so in the knowledge base). So my javascript parses the passed in search terms and produces a traintimes.org.uk URL based on them. Originally I made it to just take the sort of thing I have above, then I got really carried away (well, it didn’t take long to get that far and Torchwood still hadn’t started). It now handles a few more advanced terms, for example: train from newcastle to “london kings cross” in 3 hours More: Now also handles returns and days other than today, see below

The Bookmarklet

Updated!!

The bookmarklet has been moved to it’s own page because things were getting a bit difficult to manage here (and I couldn’t actually get the edit to the post to save with the new version in place!!). Feel free to comment here still if you want.