Eureka!

You know, after even just a few posts it can get a it tedious to find information that has been posted in your blog in the past. One way around this is to add a google search to your blog. That saves you the time and effort of having to create your own search utility.

To do this, you need a few things:

• Get the original code from Google: http://news.google.com/searchcode.html
• Make sure you site is indexed by Google, otherwise it won’t return any results: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Now that you have that, you’ll need to customize the search code a bit. Lets start with the base code (I’ll use the safe search code):

<!-- Google SafeSearch  --><center> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">  <input name="ie" value="UTF-8" type="hidden">  <input name="oe" value="UTF-8" type="hidden">  <input name="safe" value="strict" type="hidden">  <table bgcolor="#ffffff">   <tbody>    <tr>     <td>      <a href="http://www.google.com/search?safe=vss">       <img src="http://www.google.com/logos/Google_Safe.gif" alt="Google" align="middle" border="0" height="45" width="115" />      </a>            <input name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value="" type="text">            <input name="sa" value="Google Search" type="submit">          </td>        </tr>      </tbody>  </table> </form></center><!-- Google SafeSearch -->

For my purposes I got rid of some ‘unnecessary’ things like the Google logo and reduced the button text to ‘->’. The main reason for this is saving space. I also added another form field that instructs google to search my blog site only:

<!-- Google SafeSearch  --><center>  <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search">    <input name="ie" value="UTF-8" type="hidden">    <input name="oe" value="UTF-8" type="hidden">    <input name="q" size="25" maxlength="255" value="" type="text">    <input name="safe" value="strict" type="hidden">    <input name="sitesearch" value="eureka.emmgee.com" type="hidden">    <input name="sa" value="->" type="submit">  </form></center><!-- Google SafeSearch -->

Google away, mateys!

How to do transparent redirects if you don’t have control of the httpd.conf file (for apache servers) and can’t make symbolic links (no telnet access)? After much researching I didn’t like the answer I found at all: namely the most clumsy frame-in-the-hat trick.

Appearently the only way to keep a user from knowing the they are being redirected is to have the entry page be a full-page frame, which then will the desired source target. So if you want http://www.mygreaturl.com to point to http://www.mynotsogreaturl.com, you’d place the following in http://www.mygreaturl.com/index.html:

<frameset rows="*">    <frame src="http://www.mynotsogreaturl.com/"></frameset>

This is about the only way I could get this to work. But, like I said, there are numerous more elegant ways to do this if you have access to TelNet or even your httpd.conf file.

Heya folks!

In the past I had problems installing the new and improved 1.0 version of Bluefish (web-dev application for Debian-based Linux) in Linspire. However, I came across a helpful post on the Linspire forums that really helped me out:

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment the URL paths.
2. Open a console window and enter super-user mode (su -> ENTER -> admin password).
3. Type the following: “apt-get install bluefish”.
4. Apt-Get will now download the latest version of Bluefish, including any missing dependencies, and install everything.
5. To run Bluefish, navigate: L -> Run Programs -> Software Development -> Bluefish Editor.

During this installation I did indeed see some warnings pop up, however, everything seemed to work fine. My guess is that those were configuration settings that the apt-get package was expecting, but don’t exist in Linspire.

Happy coding!