PHP Quicklink Script
Jan 26 2007, 12:00PM
Ok, so you may know about Firefox quick searches, which is very nice. But keeping them updated on multiple machines, or new machines can be a pain.
So, after using quick searches for a while, I switched to yubnub, which does something similar, but it's a social app. With yubnub, when setting up a new machine, I just had to add yubnub as a search engine once for each new machine - and I was off and running (the sequence then would be 'ctrl+k' to get to the search bar, then 'g python regex' to do a google search for example).
The disadvantages of yubnub are: You can only add a command if someone else hasn't already added it. Also yubnub goes down fairly frequently.
So - here is my solution: I wrote a simple PHP script that duplicates the quick search, put it on my website, then followed a tutorial on how to create a custom search engine. That's it. I do have to log into my server and modify the array in that script when I want to create a new quicklink - but it's a minor inconvenience. I just install my custom search engine on any new machine I'm working on, and I have all my links available.
<?PHP
$qlarray = array(
'dpop' => 'http://del.icio.us/popular/%s',
'dt' => 'http://del.icio.us/tag/%s',
'du' => 'http://del.icio.us/%s',
'gma' => 'http://mail.google.com/mail/',
'gcal' => 'http://www.google.com/calendar/render',
'g' => 'http://www.google.com/search?q=%s',
);
if(array_key_exists('cmd', $_GET)){
$action = split(' ', $_GET['cmd'], 2);
if(array_key_exists($action[0], $qlarray)){
$redir = $qlarray[$action[0]];
if(count($action) > 1){
// replace %s with remaind of command
$redir = str_replace('%s', $action[1], $redir);
}else{
// strip %s
$redir = str_replace('%s', '', $redir);
}
header("Location: $redir");
}
}
?>
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