Monday, August 11, 2008

PHP Firefox Search Plugin

I started a new job today and as I was setting up my workspace, I decided to create a simple php search plugin for firefox. You can usually locate these search engines in firefox at the top left corner.

It turns out this is a very simple process and involves creating an open search xml document. From what I understand even internet explorer supports this format.

The hardest thing was to get the php icon afixed to my plugin. I downloaded the ico file from http://www.php.net/download-logos.php. I then wrote a quick php script to base 64 encode it so that I could plop it into my xml document without having to worry about hosting the image somewhere.

Unfortunatly, since blogger doesn't let me upload arbitrary files for linking into this post. I had to upload my work to my server. If you are interested you can find it here http://fiwizone.com/alex/phpNet.xml

Much later after doing some poking, I found out that there was an open search document for php.net already written and posted on the php.net website. You can find it at http://us3.php.net/phpnetimprovedsearch.src





2 comments:

Adrian said...

A new job.. how exciting! and you even have time to post on your blog too lol.

fiwizone still alive and strong eh? looks kind of empty though, good thing I still remember the url to the chat page.

Unknown said...

@adrian

somehow fiwizone got hacked and they keep dropping a corrupted index.htm which does some wierd javascript in my root directory. I've been meaning to rectify this with the hosting company. But I'm so lazy I guess. I think I'm going to consider getting a dedicated server from slicehost.com.

We will see.