Jordy Blog

I created a little Firefox search engine add-on for LDSMedia (a company with which I am affiliated with through Provo Labs). (LDSMedia is a search engine site with tons of indexed LDS content –wonderful for doing LDS research, study, lesson preparation, etc.)

Anyway, now you can search LDS content right from your Firefox browser by installing this little plugin. It’s super easy. After following my link, just click on the “LDSMedia” link (note the CAPS), click “OK”, then find the new option in your list of search engines in Firefox.

So now great LDS content is searchable without needing to go to the site first. Cool, right? I use this type of search engine plugin a lot when I want to look up a word on Wikipedia. Why should you make one for your site?  It saves a step, it’s convenient for your readers, and it’s good way to increase exposure for your company –or in this case LDS content in general. I imagine we’ll be creating plugins for each of our search engines.

I thought that creating the plugin would be kind of tricky, but it’s really just a small script, and the Mozilla Search Plugin Documentation is really quite thorough. So I just followed the instructions in the quick start; it was mostly copy-and-paste with a few values changed.

So there you have it, Firefox search plugins for fun and profit!

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If you haven’t seen Writely (the beta online word processor) yet, you really should check it out. I think the “online platform” thing is going to be huge, and (although I love Excel) I hope Writely rocks proprietary Microsoft to its core. Writely looks sharp and is sure to grow with the funding and reputation of Google behind it.

Some things I like:

• Writely imports and exports to Open Office’s newly ISO approved OpenDocument files
• Writely automatically backs up your files every 8 seconds
• Writely supports multiple editors at once (a purpose for which I used wiki all through college).
• Writely versions your editions so you can easily revert to previous state.

One thing I don’t like:

• “WWW2″ right in the URL… It’s just too much.

I’m sure I’ll find other things I dislike as I try it out. Writely is free, but it won’t accept new users until June or July. I signed up for the mailing list to get an early crack at it.