RSS-Spider

First Happy New Year to the both of you who read this page. Welcome 2006. May it be a great year.

Ok… now that thats out of the way our first big accomplishment of the year with RSS-Spider is to create a search bar plugin for Firefox. I had noticed some traffic coming from an odd Mozilla page tonight and see that Xavier Casto had created a search bar plug in for RSS-Spider. Cool… however, Firefox will only do GETS to search engines and RSS-Spider will only do POSTS. So Xavier created a special page somewhere on WISC.edu which would convert the GETS to POSTS. Well if WISC.edu goes down this isn’t much help and the plugin dies on the vine… or bar.

Now to avoid this I tooled around for about an hour reading the documentation on creating plugins and figured that I could easily create a GET->POST page. Ding ding ding. Well if you would now like to add our PLUGIN to your Firefox browser go to this page…

ADD RSS-SPIDER SEARCH BAR PLUGIN TO FIREFOX

Click on the link where prompted and you’ll then notice the RSS icon in the drop down search bar in the upper right hand corner of Firefox.

Happy New Year!

You can now search for sites in RSS-Spider. “SITE:” (without the quotes of course) + www.webaddress.com will search for all items listed in our database from that particular site. Searching for SITE:www.cleveland.com will show all the RSS items from www.Cleveland.com (if any). Unlike Google or Yahoo! you can also do a partial site search… Searching for SITE:cleveland will search for all web addresses with the term cleveland in them and return all items on those pages.