BBDB related Firefox extension

BBDB related Firefox extension

[Daniel Brooks]

I imagine that not everyone on this group follows Firefox extensions,
but there's a really interesting one that was released a few days
ago. It's called Operator (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/),
and basically it parses information from webpages that use
microformats (microformats.org) and gives the user ways to actually
use that information, such as sending the data to an address book, or
a mapping website.

Since I use Gnus and BBDB for my email and address book, I wrote an
extension to it that takes contact information from an hCard and uses
emacsclient to insert it into the BBDB. It's available from
http://db48x.net/microformats/bbdb.js. It's still in the very early
stages, and all it can do is send the data to emacs. It can't detect
duplicate entries or try to merge them or anything like that, but I
thought someone might be interested.

I welcome any feedback.

db48x

Re: BBDB related Firefox extension

[Gernot Hassenpflug]

Daniel Brooks <db48x@yahoo.com> writes:

> I imagine that not everyone on this group follows Firefox extensions,
> but there's a really interesting one that was released a few days
> ago. It's called Operator (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/),
> and basically it parses information from webpages that use
> microformats (microformats.org) and gives the user ways to actually
> use that information, such as sending the data to an address book, or
> a mapping website.
>
> Since I use Gnus and BBDB for my email and address book, I wrote an
> extension to it that takes contact information from an hCard and uses
> emacsclient to insert it into the BBDB. It's available from
> http://db48x.net/microformats/bbdb.js. It's still in the very early
> stages, and all it can do is send the data to emacs. It can't detect
> duplicate entries or try to merge them or anything like that, but I
> thought someone might be interested.

Wow! That sounds great. I will try this tonight. Hmm, never used the
vCard/hCard microformats (although many MS Windows OS users have
vCards attached to their emails), missed that bit of web magic!

Would it be possible to modify such an extension in Thunderbird (or
mozilla) also, read email adddresses from BBDB and add them to the
Thunderbird (or mozilla) addressbook?

Regards,
        Gernot
-- 
Gernot Hassenpflug (gernot@rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp)      Tel: +81 774 38-3866
JSPS Fellow (Rm.403, RISH, Kyoto Uni.)              Fax: +81 774 31-8463
www.rish.kyoto-u.ac.jp/radar-group/members/gernot   Mob: +81 90 39493924

Re: BBDB related Firefox extension

[Springfield]

Daniel Brooks <db48x@yahoo.com> writes:

> Since I use Gnus and BBDB for my email and address book, I wrote an
> extension to it that takes contact information from an hCard and
> uses emacsclient to insert it into the BBDB. It's available from
> http://db48x.net/microformats/bbdb.js. It's still in the very early
> stages, and all it can do is send the data to emacs. It can't detect
> duplicate entries or try to merge them or anything like that, but I
> thought someone might be interested.

Strange that you should post that as I've just converted a list of
vCards to the bbdb format with what might be the worlds hackiest
script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>) {
  print "[\"$2\" \"$1\" nil nil nil nil (\""
    if (/^N:(\w+);(\w+);/);

  if (/^EMAIL;.*[^:]:(.*)$/) {
    print qq{$1") ((creation-date . "2007-01-03") (timestamp . };
    print qq{"2007-01-03")) nil]\n};
  }
}

Lots of assumptions made I know but it was a one off for me.

Cheers,
Spring

Re: BBDB related Firefox extension

[Daniel Brooks]

Gernot Hassenpflug <gernot@mb3.seikyou.ne.jp> writes:

> Daniel Brooks <db48x@yahoo.com> writes:
>
>> I imagine that not everyone on this group follows Firefox extensions,
>> but there's a really interesting one that was released a few days
>> ago. It's called Operator (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/),
>> and basically it parses information from webpages that use
>> microformats (microformats.org) and gives the user ways to actually
>> use that information, such as sending the data to an address book, or
>> a mapping website.
>>
>> Since I use Gnus and BBDB for my email and address book, I wrote an
>> extension to it that takes contact information from an hCard and uses
>> emacsclient to insert it into the BBDB. It's available from
>> http://db48x.net/microformats/bbdb.js. It's still in the very early
>> stages, and all it can do is send the data to emacs. It can't detect
>> duplicate entries or try to merge them or anything like that, but I
>> thought someone might be interested.
>
> Wow! That sounds great. I will try this tonight. Hmm, never used the
> vCard/hCard microformats (although many MS Windows OS users have
> vCards attached to their emails), missed that bit of web magic!
>
> Would it be possible to modify such an extension in Thunderbird (or
> mozilla) also, read email adddresses from BBDB and add them to the
> Thunderbird (or mozilla) addressbook?

Yea, you could write an extension to do that. This one wouldn't be
suitable to modify for that purpose though. The easiest way to go
would be to read and parse the .bbdb file and put it's contents into
Thunderbird's address book.

Also, in case you've upgraded to Operator .6.1, there's a small change
that will need to be made to bbdb.js in order for it to work. I'll try
to make that change over the weekend.

db48x