We’ve all seen it: the harsh white background, serif fonts, and window-border hugging indicitive of unstyle (or very lightly styled) (X)HTML.  Today I discovered something: it takes very little CSS to take a basic HTML page and give it some flavour (and make it less painful on the eyes).  Just eight lines of CSS.

Not all pages have such CSS, however, and sometimes it might be nice to just hit a button and get some style.  So I created a bookmarklet.  Drag it to your bookmark bar, and next time you see an unstyled page, hit it.  Basic styles will be added instantly.

First off, my social network search engine now has a domain thanks to Tantek!  It’s just a redirect forwarder for now, but much easier to remember!

I have been polishing some bits of the search engine and am pleased to report that it now has a complete API!

First off, the microformat API.  All data is marked up with hCard, this allowing pages on the engine to double as API output.  This is the preferred method.  If you really must, a JSON(P) variant is available.

These are the endpoints for a standard search:

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/?q=NAME

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/search.js.php?q=NAME

These are the endpoints to search from the “point of view” of a particular person (specify a URL):

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/?q=NAME&pov=URL

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/search.js.php?q=NAME&pov=URL

To retrieve data about a specific user use:

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/person.php?id=ID

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/person.js.php?id=ID

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/person.php?url=URL

http://scrape.singpolyma.net/profile/person.js.php?url=URL

And that’s it!  This stuff powers my contacts page and the bookmarklet.