Hypsometry. Modal Synthesis.

As I mentioned, I spend a fair amount of time on the Aquarius Records website. They carry stuff that no one else has, and their reviews are fabulous.

(An aside: A few weeks ago, I found myself in Other Music, trying to decide whether to buy a CD. I didn’t quite trust their opinion on the matter, so I busted out my phone, went into Safari, and found a review of the CD on the Aquarius site. That should give you a sense of the situation.)

Their site is plenty functional, though if your eyes are as sensitive as mine, I wouldn’t recommend viewing the source. The main way to interact with it is through the keyword search. However, the muscle behind the search is a CGI script (stored in /bin, of course), to which the search form POSTs.

This is annoying. Because the form POSTs your search, the URL of your search results is always the same, no matter what you searched for: http://aquariusrecords.org/bin/search.cgi. If you reload that page, you’ll get an annoying dialog box from your browser, checking to make sure that really want to do that. If you bookmark that page and return to it later, you’ll get an Internal Server Error message. Ditto for copying and pasting the URL (to email to a friend, for instance).

What the site should be doing, of course, is redirecting your search to a URL that responds to GET requests and that contains the searched for string in the URL itself. (Post, redirect, get, that is.) Then all those little annoyances would go away.

It turns out, however, that Aquarius’s search script doesn’t actually care whether you POST or GET to it. The string to be searched for needs to be passed as the search_string parameter, and that’s enough: http://aquariusrecords.org/bin/search.cgi?search_string=daniel higgs, for example. Which is fully bookmarkable, copy-and-pasteable, reloadable, and error free.

Camino is my main browser these days. One of its many cool features is the ability to create search shortcuts. I’ve got a whole pile of them set up, for all the different searches I perform often: Wikipedia, the weather, Amazon, movies, Yelp, the library, etc.

To create one for Aquarius:

1. I went to a search URL that I had created, http://aquariusrecords.org/bin/search.cgi?search_string=daniel higgs, and bookmarked it, changing the name to the more general “Aquarius Records Search”.
2. Then I went to Camino’s bookmarks page and edited the bookmark’s URL to be http://aquariusrecords.org/bin/search.cgi?search_string=%s. That’s the key: Change the search string to %s. Camino will automatically replace %s with your search string.
3. Last, I assigned the shortcut aq to the bookmark.

Now I can type aq paul metzger into Camino and go directly to the Aquarius search page for Paul Metzger. Simple and easy, and good for your ears.

You can read more complete information on Camino’s search shortcuts on their documentation page. Firefox has the same feature, and I think Saft adds a similar feature to Safari.