I love Delicious. It allows me to store my bookmarks, tag and search them, and, best of all, have access to them from anywhere on the web.

Searching bookmarks by keyword is easy – just enter a bunch of keywords into the search page and off you go but what if you want to confine your results to a certain domain? The main reason I wanted to do it personally is so that I could see all pages of my site bookmarked by Delicious users and the corresponding number of bookmarks. However, the only url based search Delicious offered was a full url lookup:

This search is very limited – it accepts only a full url to the page in question.

Such limitations were unacceptable and prompted me to file a suggestion/idea on the Delicious forum earlier this year to allow searching for *all* bookmarks in a given domain. To my pleasant surprise, Delicious rolled out these new search features within the last month (very quietly for some reason, are they in alpha?). There was no mention of them on their blog or anywhere else on the web really.

So how does the new search/filter work?

Check it out:

site:yoursite.com allows searching by domain

For example, site:beerpla.net currently returns 104 results and I can see all of my sites' pages and their bookmark numbers on a single page:

Moreover, you can combine the site: query with tags

Like so: site:beerpla.net hidden php to filter the results further.

You can also search part of a url using the url: construct

For example, url:beerpla.net/2009/ finds bookmarked blog posts from 2009 only:

I'm not really sure why one would use site: if they could just use url: – it seems like the latter can do everything the former can do and more. Perhaps Delicious can clarify that.

Also, doing something like url:hidden-features-of doesn't bring back any results, even though I thought url: is supposed to search parts of the url. A bug or a feature?

Conclusion

Thanks to Delicious for following through with the search improvements and listening to your users. Special thanks to Delicious's own britta for being on top of things and responding to an 8 month old forum post.

Now perhaps someone will write a plugin to figure out the TOTAL number of bookmarks for a specific domain or modify an existing one (*cough*, ImprovingTheWeb, *cough*)?

• Hidden Features Of Perl, PHP, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, Python, And Others [Collection Of Incredibly Useful Lists]
• Essential Firefox Extensions (Plugins, Add-Ons) And Tips – A Comprehensive Guide :: Part 1 :: Tips
• Twitter.com Autocomplete, Auto URL Expansion, Auto URL Shortener, RT Button, Nested Replies, Inline Media Embed, Search Tabs, And More
• Monitor All Your Domains From One Location
• Google PageRank Update Happening Now

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

So, one day someone at StackOverflow started a "Hidden features of" post about a famous language (I don't feel like finding out which one was first exactly), and it turned out to be so popular that other posts in the same series started popping up.

Such questions were quickly turned into community wikis, for the purposes of harvesting and organizing information coming from the best developers on the planet and voted by users of the site. There are literally hundreds of answers, sorted by votes.

Hidden Features Of

Programming Languages

Hidden features of ActionScript3 / Flex

Hidden features of ASP.NET

Hidden features of x86 assembly

Hidden features of C

Hidden features of C++

Hidden features of C#

Hidden features of ColdFusion

Hidden features of D

Hidden features of Delphi

Hidden features of Erlang

Hidden features of F#

Hidden features of Flash development, Flash language (AS2/3), and Flash IDE

Hidden features of Java

Hidden features of JavaScript

Hidden features of Haskell

Hidden features of Lisp

Hidden features of Lua

Hidden features of Objective-C

Hidden features of Perl

Hidden features of PHP

Hidden features of Python

Hidden features of R

Hidden features of Ruby

Hidden features of Ruby on Rails

Hidden features of Scala

Hidden features of Silverlight

Hidden features and Dark Corners of STL?

Hidden features of TCL/TK

Hidden features of VB.Net

Hidden features of VBA

Databases

Hidden features of MySQL

Hidden features of Oracle

Hidden features of PL/SQL

Hidden features of PostgreSQL

Hidden features of SQL Server

Mobile

Hidden features of Android development

Other

Hidden features of Bash – also see my bash cheatsheet.

Hidden features of CSS

Hidden features of Django

Hidden features of Eclipse

Hidden features of Emacs

Hidden features of Grails

Hidden features of Greasemonkey

Hidden features of HTML

Hidden features of HTTP

Hidden features of jQuery

Hidden features of mod_rewrite

Hidden features of Qt

Hidden features of RegEx

Hidden features of Spring framework

Hidden features of VHDL

Hidden features of Visual Studio (2005-2008)

Hidden features of Windows.Forms

Hidden features of WPF and XAML

Hidden features of Xpath+Xslt

I will try to maintain this list, adding new languages that join the series as I find them. Now go learn something new!

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• Delicious.com [Quietly] Rolls Out Domain And Url Searching/Filtering. Finally!

I stumbled upon this most excellent series of posts by Moritz Lenz of perlgeek.de that describe the differences between Perl 5 and the upcoming Perl 6 (thanks to Andy Lester for the link). The posts are done in the form of tutorials, which helps comprehension. Simply awesome, Moritz.

It seems like Perl 6 is going to be a lot more object oriented, but such orientation is optional and not forced upon programmers, like in, say, Java. It warms my heart that I will be able to do this (you did see the new "say" function in Perl 5.10, right?):

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my Num $x = 3.4;
say $x.WHAT; # Num
say "foo".WHAT; # Str

My favorite Perl 6 change so far is this:

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# named arguments
 
sub doit(:$when, :$what) {
  say "doing $what at $when";
}
 
doit(what => 'stuff', when => 'once');  # 'doing stuff at once'
 
doit(:when, :what('more stuff')); # 'doing more stuff at noon'

I've first seen this technique in Ruby (apparently Python has it too), and have been using an anonymous hash in order to emulate named arguments in Perl 5. Perl 6 does it in a much cleaner way.

I wonder if there are any Perl 6 changes specifically affecting file/disk access, MySQL interaction, and execution speed.

What is your favorite new feature? Comments welcome.

Edit: Whoa, string concatenation is now ~, the dot . is used for method calls. That's kind of upsetting, I'm so used to '.'.

Edit #2: Holy crap, regex changed so much, it just warped my head onto itself and now I have a black hole in place of my face, thanks a lot. Regexes are also now called "Rules". More here

• Watch – A Useful Linux Command You May Have Never Heard Of
• How Do I Get Both The Return Value And Text In Perl? Backticks vs. System() (Perl 5.10)
• Interesting Uses For Google Streetview (Video By Google)
• MySQL Conference Liveblogging: EXPLAIN Demystified (Tuesday 2:00PM)
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