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Advanced Dork Firefox add-on gives you right-click access to Google search options

When developing blogs or sites on WordPress, we often have to search for information or need help solving a problem, and in those times many of us turn to Google. Did you know that Google has zillions of ways that you can focus your searches and make them even better? The major drawback is that you have to remember zillions of queries in order to do that, and in the end it’s just so much easier to do a regular search and see what you get.

That’s when Advanced Dork Firefox Add-on comes to the rescue! All you have to do is right-click it in Firefox, and you get a whole myriad of Google search options.

Here’s what the download page says about the Add-on:

Advanced Dork: Main Functions:

• Highlight any text, right click, and choose from over 15 Advanced Google Operators. This function can be disabled in the options menu.
• Right click anywhere on the page with no text selected to be provided with the active pages HTML title for use with Google’s intitle Operator, and the active pages HTML ALT tags for use with Google’s allintext Operator. This function can be disabled in the options menu.
• Right click on a link and choose from site: links domain, link: this link, and cache: this link. Site: links domain will only search the domain name, not the full url.
• Right click the URL Bar (aka Address Bar) and choose from site, inurl, link, and cache. Inurl works with the highlighted portion of text only. Site will only search the domain name, not the full url.

Sound good? Visit the Advanced Dork download page to learn more and get the Add-on.

Posted in Tips | Tags: Google, search | No Comments »

Unique and useful WordPress Plugins at Urban Giraffe

Urban Giraffe has a list of amazing plugins that the guy behind the site, John Godley, developed. Many of these plugins are really unique, and I haven’t seen anything like them anywhere else.

Here are the ones that I find most interesting, and I hope to try out soon:

• Filled In - Places a customized form on your site, and stores submitted data in a database. The plugin features email reporting, AJAX support, CAPTCHA support, and file uploads. The data can be exported to CSV or XML.
• Advanced Permalinks - If you decide midway to change your permalink structure to something friendlier, this generally means you have to do it sitewide and for all existing posts, which means redirecting everything. This plugin allows you to say “From now on, all posts will have permalink structure B, while posts until now will retain permalink structure A.” Can save a lot of headache.
• Search Unleashed - Makes searching WordPress blogs more user-friendly by adding the following features:
  

  • Full text search with wildcards and logical operations
  • Search posts, pages, comments, titles, URLs, tags, and meta-data (all configurable)
  • Search data after it has been processed by plugins, not before
  • Search highlighting of all searches, including titles and comments
  • Search highlighting of incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Baidu, and Sogou
  • Search results show contextual search information, not just a post excerpt
  • Record search phrases and display in a log
  • Exclude specific posts and pages from results
  • Compatible with WP-Cache
  • Supports WordPress 2.0.5 through to 2.3
  • No changes required to your theme

• User Permissions - Allows you to assign permissions to specific posts. This sounds like it could be good if you offer premium content on your site.
• Anti-Email Spam - Simple plugin to encode email addresses with either JavaScript or HTML entities and protect yourself against email harvesting scripts. I should have done something like this a loooong time ago.

See ‘em all at: Plugins - Goodies for WordPress | Urban Giraffe»

Posted in Plugins | Tags: forms, multi-user, permalinks, search | No Comments »

Search Pages, Comments and more with Search Everything Plugin

In default WordPress installations, the search function only yields results for posts. It does not search pages, comments, or anything else.

Search Everything from Dan Cameron solves that problem. Install and activate the plugin, and then go to Options > Search Everything to select what exactly you want to be searched. Here are the options:

• Pages
• Comments
• Only approved comments
• Drafts
• Attachments
• Custom fields (metadata)

I’m not sure why people would want users to see results in drafts or custom fields, but maybe there is a use for that that I’m not aware of.

Search Everything Plugin>> 

Posted in Plugins | Tags: comments, file management, Pages, search | No Comments »

The Excerpt Reloaded

Update June 6, 2007: There is a problem with closing HTML tags in Kaf’s Excerpt Reloaded Plugin. This means that if you define <ul> as one of the HTML tags you want to preserve in your excerpts, you may end up with a page of excerpts that is one big list, since the closing </ul> may be ommitted. Rob created a mod of the Excerpt Reloaded plugin which preserves closing tags, but after testing it out on this site, I found that the first version still had some problems with formatting. Rob went and fixed his plugin, which I subsequently activated on this site, and now my excerpts look normal! Bless his soul. Read my full review of this new mod.

Update June 5, 2007: Rob from Rob’s Notebook posted a comment, which you can see below, about his mod of the Excerpt Reloaded plugin. There is a problem with the original plugin where very often the closing paragraph tag </p> is missing. Rob says that his plugin fixes that. I have installed his plugin on this site, but haven’t seen any noticeable improvements since the biggest problem that I’ve found with the original plugin, and which still exists with his, is that almost none of the tags are closed. Blockquote, ul, li are all left open, and therefore affect the entire page that follows any excerpts with any of these tags. You can see what I mean by clicking on the archive links in the sidebar.

One of my clients asked me to make sure that links are displayed in excerpts. I don’t know what the advantage of not having links in excerpts is, and why WordPress defaults to removing these links.

After searching extensively on the web, it seems that the only solution to this problem is The Excerpt Reloaded plugin at guffszub.net. This plugin customizes which HTML tags to allow, length of the excerpt (in words), “more…” link, and filtering type.

At first I couldn’t get it to work, but I figured out what the problems were, and I want to share them in case others have trouble too:

1. I didn’t download the zip file, and was using the display page instead. No matter what I did, I kept getting an error message when I activated the plugin. It turns out that the display page has a space at the end of the code after the closing php tags. Once I deleted the space, the plugin began to work.
2. Guff says to put the function in The Loop. Maybe it’s because I was tired, but I understood that to mean that it just needed to appear anywhere within The Loop to work. What it actually means is that the function needs to appear wherever it is that you want the excerpt text to appear. So for example, if you want the excerpt to appear instead of the content, you need to replace <?php the_content();?> with <?php the_excerpt_reloaded(); ?>.
3. Make sure you put the tag in all the template files that are relevant. Some examples of files that you may want or need to modify are index.php, home.php, archive.php, search.php, and category.php. (Don’t worry if you can’t find some of these files in your theme - some of these files are optional for themes.)

The Excerpt Reloaded is now activated on this site.

Rob’s mod of the Excerpt Reloaded Plugin is now activated on this site.

Kaf’s Original Excerpt Reloaded>>
Rob’s mod of the Excerpt Reloaded Plugin>>

Posted in Plugins | Tags: excerpts, posts, search | 7 Comments »