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sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, Jun. 1 - Jun. 7, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm playing around with writing a Chrome extension that identifies countries of the world in the browser and marks them up with expandable, at-a-glance summary data for that country, like GDP per capita, composite index scores (HDI, MPI, etc.), literacy rate, principal exports and so on. I find myself regularly looking this up on Wikipedia anyway, and figured I'd remove the inconvenience of doing so.
This example probably isn't that useful for everyone, but it got me wondering what other sets of things could be marked up in the browser in this way. Another example that occurred to me was legislature voting records, where a similar plugin would provide easy visibility of how elected representatives voted on legislation. Again, not useful for everyone, but I could imagine political junkies getting some use out of it.
Such a set of mark-uppable entities would have to be either identifiable by format (like an ISBN) where the data could be fetched from a remote source, or a finite list of a few hundred items (like countries), where the data could be stored locally. What kinds of things would you like this sort of visibility on in the browser? Is there a set of entities you find yourself tiresomely looking up data for over and over again?
(Partly inspired by the Dictionary of Numbers)
Names/EmailAddresses/Phone numbers of people can be useful. Both by drawing information from my contact book but also in the way https://rapportive.com/ works.
Unit conversion would be interesting. If someone writes the price of 5£ however over that price to see the conversion to Euro and dollar would be useful.
Whenever I read temperature noted in °F, I would appreciate being able to hover over it to see a conversion into the sensible format of °C. The same goes for units like inches. When I read a time noted in EST I would like automatic conversion into GMT+1 with happens to be where I live.
I use autoConvert for that on Chrome.
I would like a Chrome or Firefox extension that notices when I type something like a hundred m2 or 100 m2 into a comment box (there are not so many grammatically valid combinations so it is not too hard) and it turns it into a link saying 1076 sqft, for example linking to a Google search, they do the conversion automatically when I type "100 m2 to sqft" into Google. I really dislike non-metric units, but I have to be realistic, when I want to discuss say what is a good size for a family of 3 on the English speaking Internet, I guess better cut some slack for imperial units.
This would also help those of us that were raised with the imperial rather than metric system acclimate to their usage in approximating values.
I'm still sad that there isn't a dictionary of numbers for Firefox, it sounds amazing but it isn't enough to make me switch to Chrome just for that.
There was a chrome extension advertised on LW a while ago that did this for "alternate points of view" - but it was crowdsourced, and didn't have enough links to be useful. But an automated version of that (that say, detected keywords, and posted up links) would be great.
I think you mean http://rbutr.com/
Yeup, that was it!
This kind of thing sounds very useful especially if easily extensible. How are you planning to make the ui for this work? I think it would be fairly challenging to make it both easily available without being obnoxiously overpresent and am interested to hear your approach to the problem.
For the country data example, every instance of a country name is prepended with a small icon (for development purposes this is currently an obnoxious red X, but I plan to replace this with a neutral-coloured globe or something), and the name itself is wrapped in some custom style (currently boldface, but could be anything). Clicking on the icon places a container with the relevant data on the page, offset to the same location as the icon, (giving the illusion of the icon "expanding" to show the data). Clicking on the icon again, or away from the container, removes it.
In terms of extensibility, all the data is in a local JSON file, and the format of the data container is an HTML template that might eventually live in the same file. I'm also planning on having local image assets (maps and flags). This could all be swapped out for anything, or even obtained from a web service.
Yeah that seems like it would work pretty well for the case of country data. Let us know how development goes!