Agenda bookmarklet

In typical programmer fashion, I spent ten minutes last night crafting a solution to a problem that takes ten seconds by hand. But in the long run, I'll be ahead, right?

Several times a week, I go looking for the most recent agenda for a working group, and often the most recent minutes as well. For some working groups, XProc for example, the pattern for these links is entirely predictable: “http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc/YEAR/MONTH/DAY-agenda”.

So I go into the address bar and start typing. Eventually, I find it in the drop down or I get to the end of the string. Either way, it's tedious and I'm doing something the computer could do for me.

Thus are born the agenda and minutes bookmarklets.

The “agenda” link takes you to the agenda for next week's meeting; the “minutes” link takes you to the minutes for the last week's meeting. Depending on the day of the week, one or the other might not exist yet, though both do today (9 May 2008).

In case you're curious, here's the code for the business end of the agenda link, before it's obfuscated into a URI:

function nw(base,suffix,weekday) {
  var today = new Date();
  var dayms = 3600 * 24 * 1000;
  var dow = today.getDay();

  var date = new Date();
  var offset = today.valueOf() - (dow * dayms) + (weekday * dayms);
  if (weekday < dow) {
    offset += 7 * dayms;
  }
  date.setTime(offset);

  var uri = base + "/" + date.getFullYear() + "/";
  if (date.getMonth() < 9) {
    uri += "0";
  }
  uri += (date.getMonth()+1) + "/";
  if (date.getDate() < 10) {
    uri += "0";
  }
  uri += date.getDate() + "-" + suffix + ".html";

  document.location = uri;
}

Calling “nw('http://www.w3.org/XML/XProc','agenda',4)” takes you to the agenda for the XProc call, “nw('http://www.w3.org/2001/tag','agenda',4)” takes you to the agenda for the TAG call (both of which happen to be on Thursday, day 4), etc. Putting the whole prefix in an argument simplifies constructing a bookmarklet for the local copies of agendas and minutes on my laptop.

Converting the nw function for agendas into the lw function for minutes is an exercise left to the reader. You can avoid the tedious process of obfuscation by simply copying the links above.