Flickr Badge

Saturday, November 13, 2004

del.icio.us search plugins

Over the last few months, I have been using del.icio.us for storing my bookmarks. In fact, my firefox bookmarks menu is almost completely empty because I hardly ever store my bookmarks there. With del.icio.us, I can access my bookmarks from any machine. Since I use more than one machine, this is a definite plus. I also use the website to explore related links and discover new websites. Coolest of all, I can subscribe to the bookmarks of other people, and import the RSS feed of the subscription as a Bloglines feed. Anytime they bookmark something new, it shows up as a new unread item in Bloglines. Amazing!

I've now got hundreds of neatly categorised bookmarks on del.icio.us, and the way you find stuff is by searching. Most often, you search your own bookmarks, but sometimes you want to search everyone's bookmarks. In order to do this, I go to the del.icio.us search page and search. After doing this for a while, I though how cool it would be if I can search from the Firefox search bar (you know, that bar on the top right which you use for searching google). I checked out the list of available search bar plugins on mozdev, and they didn't have anything for del.icio.us. There was even a pending request for this very feature. So, full of enthusiasm, I wrote my own. Because of the excellent structure of the search results webpage, this turned out to be a completely trivial task.

I have now submitted it for inclusion on the mozilla search bar plugins page. Review should be complete in a week or two. In the meantime, if anyone wants to try it out, leave a comment with your email address and I'll pass the code to you.

No comments: