I like for things to be quick and simple. Recently I have ran into the problem of wanting to search for an older article I did on Mitchelaneous, but I didn’t want to have to go through each by hand. So, what is a guy to do? I wrote a simple search plugin for Firefox, so I can let the browser do all the heavy lifting on it’s own. Now I can just select “Mitchelaneous” from the drop down search menu and get to work.
How did I do it? Well, first things first for this to work your blog needs to be run by Blogware. For example, my blogging service is set up through Lockergnome Blogs, but the back end is run by Blogware.
Now that I have that out of the way, let us go to work. First thing you need to do is create the search plugin files that you will need. I’ve done that much for you already. All you need to do is download the blank.gif and blank.src to your desktop. Still with me? Good.
Next, you will need to use a standard text editor (Notepad works fine) and open up the “blank.src” file. At the top, you should see this:
# Blank BlogWare Blog Search
# Updated by mitch@mitchkeeler.com on March 7 2004
You can ignore it, or change it to “My Web Site Search”. This is pretty much just me leaving a note to myself of what it is and when did I create it.
Now where it says “name”, this is the name that will show up in the drop down menu in Firefox. Try not to make it too long, just your Web site name will do. If you have a long Web site name, then you might just put, “LG.com” or something to that effect.
For the “blog description” just put your Web site name plus the word “search”. You could even just leave that alone for now. Not that important of a thing to edit to make this all work.
Then put in your Web site address where it says, “action” replace “http://www.yourblogaddresshere.com” to your blog’s address. For example, in my Mitchelaneous search plugin, I put in “http://mitch.lockergnome.net”.
Click save, and you are done with the hard part! Now to make a little icon to go along with your new search plugin.
As you can see, earlier I told you to download, “blank.gif”. Go ahead and open that up and take a look. Yeah, it is just your basic “B”. If you want to get fancy though, you can replace that with any other 16×16 image. The file should be a “.gif” or “.png” file as well. After you are done with that, there are only a couple of more steps to go.
Now, look at the two files you have been playing with. Are they still named, “blank.src” and “blank.gif”? If so, go ahead and rename them. Just remember that you have to give them the same exact name. You can’t name one “tom.src” and the other “harry.gif”. For example, with my Mitchelaneous search plugin, I named my files, “mitch.src” and “mitch.gif”.
Now for the easiest part! Take your files off of your desktop and paste them inside your “searchplugins” directory. This should be located here:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins
Then, close all your Firefox windows you might have open, and reopen one. Test it out! Now you too can have your own Firefox search plugin for your Web site or blog. There are a few more things you could add to the “.src” file as well, but I won’t go into that here. If you are interested though, open up a few of the “.src” files that you already have inside your “searchplugins” folder.
Also, feel free to download both of the search plugins for Firefox that I created for my Web sites. Just dump them into your “searchplugins” folder.
Mitchelaneous – mitch.src – mitch.gif
The Web Hosting Show – whs.src – whs.gif
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