A hack to start this lovely week off! Well, not a hack really. You can call this a Native Blog Search for Firefox, without the AJAX :P Steve’s post about adding microformats in your blog gave me the idea (a little late though) about ways in which we can integrate our blogs with Firefox. The various new features in 2.0 make playing around with them a lot of fun.
Firefox 2.0 supports Open Search, and when detected, it automatically highlights the search box button, and from the drop down list, you can add the newly discovered search. You would have seen it on Wikipedia, or Live.com — and now here, on this page!
Add this one itsy bitsy line to your <head> area:
<link href='http://phpplay.ning.com/Open Search/openSearch.php?blogurl=blog_url&name=blog_name&icon=url_to_icon' rel='search' title='blog_name' type='application/opensearchdescription+xml'/>
Replace the required query string variables with the respective details. Note that the blog URL has to be just your blog URL, without the trailing slash. For eg: http://lastword.blogspot.com - nothing more.
After note
While this is a cool thing to have, and gives your readers a faster way to search your blog for anything they want, there is a stupid side effect of this. Searching through this won’t add to your Search Suggest pool. This makes the Search Suggest slightly useless, but hey! I am all for options :P I plan to fix this in the future though. Will give me something to do when I really don’t have anything else ;)
Search away!