Fine tuning your textivate urls

N.B. The content of this blog post is out of date. Please see this post instead:

http://textivate.posthaven.com/fine-tuning-your-activity-urls-now-made-much-simpler-dot-dot-dot

Most textivate users will be aware that you can share links to textivate (shareable & public) resources in a number of ways, as explained on this post:
textivate.posthaven.com/sharing-and-embedding-textivate-activities

To recap, you can share a link to...:

  1. the home page (i.e. the edit screen containing the text). e.g. www.textivate.com/aocjn1
  2. the menu page (with the thumbnails for all the activities). e.g. www.textivate.com/menu-aocjn1
  3. an activity page. e.g. www.textivate.com/3x4-aocjn1

You'll notice that all of these end in a 6-character resource identifier -- in this case "aocjn1".

This blog post looks at how you can fine tune the urls for individual activities (case 3 above) to configure the exercise screen when the student lands on it. This fine tuning involves adding extra info to the resource identifier.

IMPORTANT: The modification can work in 2 ways:

  1. use "e" to enforce the configuration (i.e. the configuration can't be changed on the screen)
  2. use "s" to specify the start configuration (i.e. the configuration can be changed)

Read on for a guide on which activity urls can be fine-tuned and how to go about it...