Thursday, December 08, 2005

Purple Slurple: Find a Needle in a Haystack

How do you point out a single paragraph on a page when whole chapters (or even books) are under one URL? Some webdesigners place anchors, but let's face it, most academics aren't that tech savvy. You're lucky to have the text online.

In cases like this, Purple Slurple can be a real life-saver. Let's say you are reading chapter 2 in Derrida's Of Grammatology. You want to point out the paragraph that begins, "In short, if the Jakobsonian analysis is faithful to Saussure in this matter...".

Here's what you do:
(1) Copy the page URL and paste it over at the Slurple-maker page. Hit "Submit" and you will see the same page with a new URL.
(2) Scroll down to the paragraph of interest and you will see that it is now preceeded by number 889. Click on that number and you will have second new URL. This new URL opens directly to the paragraph of interest.
(3) At this point you could stop, but wouldn't you prefer a shorter URL? Go to TinyURL and paste the long URL. TinyURL spits back this short link: http://tinyurl.com/8vzcg. Now share with your peers and loved ones.

This is a very handy site. Thank you Matthew for creating (and posting) this javascript.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a quick tip... You could use SimURL.com instead of tiny url and actually see how many people click on a link.

Wynn Williamson said...

That's a pretty cool feature. I've always used tinyurl since it was the first one out there, but I know there are some other new ones with added bells and whistles. Thanks for a the tip.