Perspectives

Do you know that it is absolutely easy to create the firefox (and now IE7) sidebar search plugin?

First, read a bit about opensearch.
Next, head over to this page and this page at Mozilla developer center which explains the entire process beautifully. (What we discuss here is true only for FF2 and IE7. There is no search plugin concept in IE6 and for earlier versions of firefox, those two pages will tell you what to do.)

So, you essentially have to create an XML opensearch file. But, ofcourse you dont have a search engine for yourself. So, what to do ? Here is a template that you can use to create your plugin. Save it. And then, Read on.

A few things those pages wont tell you are these:

How do I get a icon like the one Yahoo or Google’s in the search bar? You probably have a favicon.ico for your site/blog. If you dont, Use an image creator. My favorite is GIMP. Create a small, 16×16 image with whatever you want inside it. For instance, mine has “S” which is the beginning alphabet in my name. Now, you probably have a jpeg or png image. Head over to the online favicon creator by html-kit. They give you a zip file. Unzip and you will have your favicon ready.

Next, You need to create a base64 version of your .ico file. Head over to this page. Replace the text on the textbox named type: with “image/x-icon”, check base64 and then upload the favicon that you just created and click generate. You get the base64 encoded string of your image file. Now, copy that string and paste it between the Image tags in the template file.

Third, make use of the fact that Google does all the hard work in indexing your pages. And that you can ask G to search just within your site by adding “site:yourdomain.com” to the search query.

There are two Url tags in that file. The first one is used for suggesting a query (auto suggestion). Did you realise that from FF2, when you start typing in the search bar, Google or Yahoo ( or most plugins) gives you an autosuggest ?

So, in these URL tags, replace yourdomain.com with your domain. And that is it. You are all set. Publish this XML and hopefully, if someone thinks your blog has a wealth of information, they may install it. For instance, here is a mine!

How many times have you installed that same firefox extension once on your laptop, and then on your office desktop and once again on your home box ? Isint that kinda silly? If there was a way to tell firefox that it is, after all, the same “you” and that you the same things when you browse, no matter from where, wouldn’t that be cool?

Now, there are many ways to extend this fundamental idea. What if you have the same skin? what about any local bookmarks ? Or, in the extreme case, you want all the tabs you had open when in office, at home(a couple of friends’ of mine have done this part a little while ago. I am not sure if it is available for public use yet. Will update once I know) ?

When I get around having some free time, I will code it up and let you guys know about it. Hopefully, you wouldnt need to install that del.icio.us’ plugin everywhere you go.