Firefox Search Engine Plugins

[moonbuggy]

I made a firefox search plugin today. Wasn't very hard. I like it. :)

http://www.moonbuggy.org/plugin.html

It works exactly like the Google search that normally lives in the top right corner of Firefox, but uses my AdSense client ID, so I'm gonna be a billionaire. Assuming I live for the next trillion years or so, that is. Otherwise, I'll make a few cents but never enough for Google to send me a cheque. Still, it's a bit of fun just learning about how this stuff works, regardless. :)

The only tricky bit was realising I needed to encode one of the GET variables, because otherwise for some reason it defaults to visited and unvisited links being the same colour, which is just annoying.

Anyways, I figured I'd share. It's trivial to change the AdSense client ID to yours if you want to employ this plugin yourself, or if you're feeling charitable and feel like throwing a few cents my way every now and then you could just install it as is. :) Or you could just ignore it completely. It's all good, I'm just amusing my self with internet fun. :)

The plugin itself is here: http://www.moonbuggy.org/plugin/GoogleBuggy.src

If you want more information on making these search plugins, you can find it here: http://mycroft.mozdev.org/

Now I just need to ponder the ethical dilemma of whether or not I should deploy this with Firefox on the domain at uni. :)

Oh, yeah, btw, I made a search plugin for ZGeek (http://www.moonbuggy.org/plugin/zgeek.html) aswell. :) It may be a bit dodgy since ZGeek's search script seems to like POST variables and the search plugins only currently support GET, but it seems to be GETting things okay and working fine for me.

Fun! :)

[moonbuggy]

Oh, btw, the direct link to the ZGeek plugin is: http://www.moonbuggy.org/plugin/zgeek.src

And the icon [I resized the favicon.ico to 16x16] is here: http://www.moonbuggy.org/plugin/zgeek.png

If you like it and you wanna host it here, I don't mind. Nor do I mind hosting it where it is. Just let me know if you do decide to host it and I can edit the update URL to point to wherever.

[moonbuggy]

Okay, so since it's quick and easy I've also whipped up a ZGeek Gallery search plugin to go along with the forum search plugin. Installable from the same page [see above].

Direct link to the script is: http://www.moonbuggy.org/plugin/zgallery.src

Pirate said something about wanting to "pimp" these plugins, which may involve hosting them on ZGeek. You don't need to wait though, if you want to install these then install them from my site and I'll change the update URL to point to ZGeek when/if Pirate puts them on here. Basically that means the code [what little of it there is :)] won't branch or anything. Your plugin will automatically know to update itself from ZGeek rather than my site, so you'll be upto date without having to do anything at all, if Pirate makes any changes to plugins.

I shouldn't have started a thread both in here and on the frontpage, because now I'm confusing myself. Updating both threads tho, just so everyone is on the same page or something. :)

[moonbuggy]

I submitted the ZGeek search plugins to mozdev today. If anyone is into that sorta thing, they need to be judged and validated or something.

http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=zgeek&submitform=Search

They're still installable from my site aswell [see earlier posts]. I'll be changing the install script there to point to mozdev once the plugins are validated, but it won't make much of a difference to anything since the scripts will all autoupdate themselves eventually and point to mozdev for updates regardless of where they were install from.

I'm rambling a bit. [shrug] It's all fun. :)

[brentwahn]

Moonbuggy, you're a legend. I'm still using these plugins. My favourite is searching zGallery for 'boobies'.

[INSAN3]

Cool Moonbuggy, I'm checking it out!