The height of arrogance

Invention is the mother of necessity, as I have said in the past, and one of the problems that I have occasionally is that I can’t find things on this site as easily as I’d like. I put together a few shortcuts in the form of the Howtos page, and I’ve collated a lot of the information into the Ubuntu setup page, but it’s still a bit taxing to pin down one particular bit of information in a hurry.

The obvious solution to that, of course, is to rely on an outside search engine to skim these pages and find the post I need. The obvious tool for that, of course, is to use Google. The obvious caveat for that, of course, is that I don’t care to pump much more into Google’s coffers by feeding them trivial searches, or put up with the ads that accompany the results, or have my IP associated with certain search terms when all I need is an option or a setting I jotted down two years ago.

So I have a tendency to rely on Scroogle, particularly the SSL search page, and the quickest way to do that is with the search engine bar in Firefox. (As a side note, if you want an image search, I feel obligated to mention that Ixquick uses SSL connections too, and doesn’t record IPs at all.)

The only problem is (are you bored yet?) that I have to keep typing “site:kmandla.wordpress.com” every time I use it. A customized search plugin is what I really need.

So here it is, the height of arrogance and yet another example of my overweening vanity: a Firefox search plugin for Motho ke motho ka botho. Of course I can’t offer a direct link to install it because, even in this day and age, WordPress.com still only allows about eight different file extensions to be uploaded to their site. I have an egregious amount of space, but unless it’s one of about six proprietary file types or two free ones, it doesn’t work.

So unfortunately this will be another cut-and-paste-and-save adventure for you. Scoop up the XML below and save it in a file in your ~/.mozilla/firefox/????????.default/searchplugins/ folder with an .xml extension. When you restart Firefox, it should show up as a search option, and when you use it, the results should only come from this site.

<searchplugin xmlns="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/" xmlns:os="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
<os:shortname>Scroogle SSL Motho ke motho ka botho</os:shortname>
<os:description>Anonymous Google searches with Scroogle.org, SSL-encrypted</os:description>
<os:inputencoding>UTF-8</os:inputencoding>
<os:image width="16" height="16">data:image/x-icon;base64,AAABAAEAEBAQAAAAAAAoAQAAFgAAACgAAAAQAAAAIAAAAAEABAAAAAAAwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAAACAAAAAgIAAgAAAAIAAgACAgAAAwMDAAICAgAAAAP8AAP8AAAD//wD/AAAA/wD/AP//AAD///8AAACZmZmZAAAAmZmZmZmZAAmZqqqqqpmQCZmQAAAAqZCZqQAAAAAKmZmgAAAAAAqZmaAACaoACpmZoACZAAAKmZmgAKkAAAqZmaAACpmaqpmZoAAAAAAKmZmqAAAAAAqZCZqgAAAJmZAJmaqqqqqZkACZmZmZmZkAAACZmZmZAADwDzgFwAPgA4ABAHyAAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA4AMAAOADAAAAfAAAAHyAAeADgAHgA8ADAADwDwAA</os:image><br /><searchform>https://ssl.scroogle.org/index.html</searchform>
<os:url type="text/html" method="POST" template="https://ssl.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/nbbwssl.cgi">
<os:param name="Gw" value="{searchTerms} site:kmandla.wordpress.com">
</os:param>
</os:url>

If you want to make one of your own, it’s terribly easy. There are tutorials available elsewhere but if you just edit the “site” string and short name in this code, you can cut and paste and save again, and it will work fine.

I should note that I trimmed out the update terms from the plugin, since it will never be updated. Wow, from alpha to 1.0 in a matter of seconds, and no bug reports! Now I can retire into the post-development Nirvana reached by only a handful of other open-source projects. … 😆