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Screenshot / Code Snippet

Column 80

About

Browsing the existing Stack Exchange family of websites was OK in a text-based browser, but when you're stuck in a Linux shell with no way out and no other computers around and you just know you saw the answer on Server Fault last week, this is how you can find it easily.

It assumes you already have existing knowledge of the SE family of sites in order to navigate.

License

Public Domain. Feel free to do with it what you will. Grab it here (note: This is the old v1 API. I have not packaged v2 yet).

Access

http://www.column80.com (note: looks like rubbish in modern browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc. It has got to be viewed in Lynx to get the full effect). offline as of late 2019 due to virtually no traffic over the past 10 years.

Platform

Optimised for Lynx. This sounded pretty niche when I made it, but it looks like it might already have been some use to some users!

Contact

Leave some feedback in this question.

Code

I haven't done any programming in about five years, so it was also a way for me refresh my skills. It uses the PHPStack by Thomas McDonald. If you really want the source and you promise not to make (public) fun of me, then I'd be more than happy to share. I've cleaned up the code a bit, and incorporated some suggestions from the public, so I feel comfortable releasing the code. Grab it here.

  • (10th Jun 2010) now updated to incorporate the unannounced API changes
  • (25th Jun 2010) changed front page to retrieve data from StackAuth, and changed URL format to prepare for URL Rewriting (using stack.PHP)
  • (11th Jul 2010) now updated to work with the v1.0 API (the list of Stack Apps sites is looking healthy!)
  • (9th May 2014) updated the site to use the v2 of the API. Removed some never-used features such as tag search and user profiles, as I'm pretty short on time.
Mark Henderson
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    +1 for acknowledging the console-lovers and treating them to this! – Nathan Osman Jun 05 '10 at 00:43
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    ...and for mentioning Lynx :) – Nathan Osman Jun 05 '10 at 00:43
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    +1 And it does look OK in Chrome. The only issue I saw was long unwrapped lines, which makes sense when optimising for a text-based browser. – Mark Hurd Jun 05 '10 at 01:28
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    @Mark, one of my plans for down the track is to wrap words nicely at 80 columns which will fix that, and make it look OK in modern browsers as well (thank God for the <pre> tag) – Mark Henderson Jun 05 '10 at 01:39
  • Yay, something useful came about as a result of my creations. What are you using for the search, considering that was the only method I haven't quite figured out the best way to do? – nobody Jun 05 '10 at 06:55
  • @Thomas, I used your search function out-of-the-box. It worked quite well, because the API requires the use of the options rather than a string, so I found it worked just fine. – Mark Henderson Jun 05 '10 at 07:35
  • Since you are using PHP, you could just use the wordwrap function: http://php.net/manual/en/function.wordwrap.php , no need for any pre tags me thinks? – SeanJA Jun 06 '10 at 22:13
  • @SeanJA, Good idea, thanks. I'll get that implemented sometime today. – Mark Henderson Jun 06 '10 at 23:12
  • @SeanJA, thanks I've done the word wrapping. It looks better in modern browsers now. – Mark Henderson Jun 07 '10 at 09:20
  • Nice idea! Have you tried it with HTML tables though? I've had good experiences with their rendering in lynx –  Jun 11 '10 at 18:04
  • What are the "unannounced changes" you mention? – Nathan Osman Jun 11 '10 at 20:03
  • @Russel_h - no need for HTML Tables, as Lynx displays the HTML just fine in its current form, Lynx tables are only good for tabular data (like a spreadsheet, which is really what Tables were designed for in the first place). – Mark Henderson Jun 11 '10 at 23:01
  • @George, I'm referring to the removal of the answers from the questions query. I had to use SODiff (http://stackapps.com/questions/631/) to spot the change. I'm guessing it was probably mentioned in some question somewhere but I don't have the time or energy to read and track every single topic on StackApps. I might have been a bit harsh though because I was having a bad day - my son had been crying for three hours straight and I couldn't get him to sleep and then he pooped on me. – Mark Henderson Jun 11 '10 at 23:03
  • @Far: It's okay. I missed that one too. I even asked a question about it :) – Nathan Osman Jun 11 '10 at 23:47
  • And for an excellent first search, try "80 column limit" :) – Tim Post Jun 14 '10 at 13:04
  • Just tried it in Lynx itself - works like a charm. One piece of advice - links to other questions in posts should probably be rewritten - like what I've done in my mobile site. – Nathan Osman Jun 20 '10 at 23:47
  • @George, yeah I need to update it to support the stackauth API endpoints as well so that could be a good oppertunity to put rewriting in. – Mark Henderson Jun 21 '10 at 05:32
  • The link to return home doesn't work. – Gelatin Sep 21 '10 at 23:00
  • You might want to add Links to the list of "allowed browsers" or it might feel left out :-) – Per Wiklander Dec 30 '10 at 06:03
  • When I try to view a question, I get an error. – Gelatin Jan 27 '11 at 21:29
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    @Simon - thanks. One of the MySQL databases went over its size quota, should all work now. – Mark Henderson Jan 27 '11 at 21:39
  • Also: http://sa.column80.com/?s=hr&t=intitle – Gelatin Feb 05 '11 at 18:00
  • @Simon - unfortunately I had to change the system to run on cookies, so once the cookies have expired you'll need to go back to column80.com and start again – Mark Henderson Feb 13 '11 at 23:33
  • I meant the
    tags in question titles being rendered.     – Gelatin Feb 14 '11 at 02:27
  • Why you'd be so addicted to SE to use this heavily is beyond me. – Mateen Ulhaq Apr 10 '11 at 22:40
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    @muntoo - if you read the description, it's not about being addicted, it's about being stuck in a console session with no other options and you still need to get access to Server Fault. – Mark Henderson Apr 11 '11 at 00:14
  • Reminds me of the DOS version of Pegasus Mail in the 90s - a staple in Netware environments. – Brian Cline Apr 12 '11 at 02:55
  • Thank you very much for this! Did the job great on the kindle browser when I was in a bit of a squeeze the other day – Filipe De Sousa Jul 12 '11 at 12:10
  • This is soooo cool! I didn't know about Lynx. Thanks for this very cool applications! – daviesgeek Jan 28 '12 at 21:59
  • Is it possible answer/ask with this code somehow? I am not yet comforbtable in using Lynx to download the codes in questions for fast edition, is there any good videos or some help things for this? This may when used correctly to speed up things and kill nasty procrastination, ideas how? –  Feb 28 '12 at 22:04
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    @hhh - no. The API does not expose these methods, not even the v2.0 API. – Mark Henderson Feb 28 '12 at 22:09
  • I wish I could use this with Vim, ideas how to use this fast with Vim? It gets killed to the Warning msg?! –  Feb 28 '12 at 22:15
  • @hhh - you can bypass the warning message, there's a link that says "I'm not going to stop you" - or, use this URL: http://www.column80.com/index.php?continue=y – Mark Henderson Feb 28 '12 at 22:44
  • I do intend to be writing a lua and python port of this project. Can I have your permission to do so? – Jakob Bowyer Mar 06 '11 at 10:42
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    Absolutally - Go for it :) – Mark Henderson Mar 06 '11 at 10:48
  • Thanks. These will be clients rather than online, and I might depending on how it goes hack answering into it. – Jakob Bowyer Mar 06 '11 at 10:51
  • If you want to save a bit of time, feel free to grab the source code and abuse it as much as you like – Mark Henderson Mar 07 '11 at 04:13
  • @MarkHenderson You've rescued me through a half-working Ubuntu recovery mode. Thanks. Although, I'd love if the API wasn't read-only. :-( – nanofarad Jun 05 '12 at 23:49
  • @ObsessiveFOSS - glad I could be of assistance. I haven't touched the v2 API yet (figured there wasn't anything of value for this app to be added, plus their online authentication isn't text mode friendly). But if it ever becomes read-write I will update it :) – Mark Henderson Jun 06 '12 at 00:10
  • @GeorgeEdison mentioning Lynx? Lynx is the browser! (even if I have to admit that I tend to use just links) – n611x007 Jun 30 '12 at 13:13
  • I might stop using SE in a graphical browser! It's so satisfying..... – ACarter Nov 06 '12 at 17:54
  • I think you meant to release it under "Public Domain" instead of "No license". "No license" means full copyright protection, and nobody can use it. – Sebastián Grignoli Jan 05 '13 at 12:44
  • You might want to remove the "you're not using lynx" banner for xlinks2 users. – thejh Mar 30 '13 at 23:31
  • @thejh - do you have a useragent string I can check against? – Mark Henderson Mar 31 '13 at 00:47
  • My useragent string is "Links (2.7; Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae i686; GNU C 4.7; x)", so maybe check for "Links .*" or so? – thejh Mar 31 '13 at 00:50
  • Public domain?! Wow. That's extreme. Awesome work! – jobukkit Jul 23 '13 at 09:41
  • @Jop - honestly, it's because I have no interest in maintaining it or updating it, so I may as well let it free into the world so people can do as they wish with it. – Mark Henderson Jul 23 '13 at 22:11
  • @PerWiklander - well better late than never. Links is on the whitelist for browsers :) – Mark Henderson May 08 '14 at 23:09

5 Answers5

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Just wanted to give you a heads-up...

One of the questions contained <button> in the title, causing the entire rest of the page to be rendered in a button. You might want to run the title through htmlentities() first.

Nathan Osman
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This is nice, but it gives the "You're not using Lynx" warning for other text-based browsers. It looks and works great in w3m as well, so it should probably skip the warning in that browser as well.

Dan Jones
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Just pointing out: this system actually violates the content license because it does not link back to the original posts or authors in any way on the questions.

From the blog:

  1. Visually indicate that the content is from Stack Overflow or the Stack Exchange network in some way. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious; a discreet text blurb is fine.

    Yes

  2. Hyperlink directly to the original question on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12345)

    No

  3. Show the author names for every question and answer

    Yes

  4. Hyperlink each author name directly back to their user profile page on the source site (e.g., https://stackoverflow.com/users/12345/username)

    No

Community
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animuson
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  • Interesting. I wonder if this applies to remixes from the API, but I guess I can comply. Not entirely sure how useful linking to the originals will be from a plain text browser, but oh well. – Mark Henderson May 22 '14 at 01:26
  • @Sally Thanks. I had forgotten about this. Ironically for years I did comply with the license but I had to make some changes a few years ago and I suspect I undid the attribution requirements. The source code for this site is, honestly, probably lost. I will see if I can dig it up to make it compliant. – Mark Henderson Feb 18 '16 at 11:08
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Searching with empty string (http://www.column80.com/api.v2.php?a=stackoverflow&s=) gives error:

Fatal error:  Uncaught Error 400: An API error has occurred.
  thrown in /home3/markness/column80.com/stackphp/src/api.php on line 284
Michał Perłakowski
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Nice but is there a nice url we can remember that goes straight to:

http://sa.column80.com/?api=0 maybe?

It would be nice to have the search button BEFORE the title and tag options.

Also I get bugged about cookies, do you really need cookies?

Luke Stanley
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  • Honestly, I hardly remember how this little app works. It might be time for a refresh. The cookies were from memory from an earlier revision that must not have been taken out. – Mark Henderson Sep 27 '12 at 01:00
  • Cookies are gone, URl structure has been changed. – Mark Henderson May 08 '14 at 23:10
  • Nice. The search is a bit hit or miss though. (E.g: it's order dependent) Have you considered using Google or Bing? – Luke Stanley May 09 '14 at 04:51
  • I am just using the built-in Stack Exchange search. I believe it's a full string search, but not entirely sure. Problem with google search is that it will redirect you to the full SE site, not my Column 80 one. That might be OK, it might not be. – Mark Henderson May 09 '14 at 04:57
  • It looks like it's possible to extract the question number from the URL. – Luke Stanley May 09 '14 at 14:01