The Cutup Engine
What it does
The Cutup Engine cuts up text and makes something
different out of the pieces. You can provide the text
directly, or URLs of things on the web.
Chunk Size & Total Length
The cutup code splits the source texts into words. A
"word" is typically a series of characters run together
without any white space. Each html tag is treated as one
word. By default, it constructs the cutup text by
pulling chunks of 3 to 7 words from the source texts and
adding on chunks until the total is at least 1,000
words. You can change those numbers on the cutup form.
Requests of more than 10,000 words will be changed to
10,000.
I'm not sure how I should separate "words" in case
of, say, Chinese text. I'm interested in
suggestions.
Archiving & Privacy
Cutups are stored on vispo.com for 30 days. If you
view it at least one day after creating it, it will be
moved to the permanent archive, where everyone can see
it. If you want yours to be archived, save its URL and
visit it a day later.
If you want to use the cutup engine without having a
record kept of your cutup, check the 'no cache' box.
Then the cutup won't be stored on vispo.com at all. It
won't have a web address, so you won't be able to go
back to it unless you save it on your computer, and it
won't be possible to add it to the archive. If you
prefer to have the 'no cache' box checked by default,
use the following link to the cutup engine instead of
the standard one:
Cutup engine (no cache)
Frames
Unfortunately, the cutup tool doesn't know how to get
into web pages that have frames. Instead, you'll get a cutup
of some text that says "your browser doesn't support frames."
However, in many browsers you can select "view only this
frame" - for instance, after right-clicking on the frame -
and then you see the address of that frame and you can put
that address into the cutup form.
Cutup bookmarklet!
Bookmark this link (right-click on it and select
'Bookmark this link', or drag it onto your bookmarks
toolbar):
Cut up this page
Now you can click the
bookmark to cut up whatever page you're looking at.
Hacker stuff
There ought to be creative ways to use this tool for
your purposes. You can tweak the query string, for
instance if you want a bookmarklet that behaves
differently:
Cut up this page (no cache)
Cut up this page (only 100 words, no cache).
You can also download the script and use it as a
command-line text manipulation tool on your pc. There
is some documentation about this in the source code.
Let me know if you find other uses for it or if I can
make it more useful.
|