use Perl

I've been fooling around with RSS a bit lately and it seems less than totally useless to me (which says a lot for the technology). Aside from traditional web content like news articles and blogs, it seems to me that syndicating web mail would make for a novel use of RSS. I'd love to have a live bookmark in FireFox for my Yahoo inbox. Each subject line could link back to the body of the message. I'm sure Yahoo will get right on this.

This would probably make me very happy.

In other news, I made my first extension to mozilla's search sidebar thingie (which may need better nomenclature). It adds a simple "always on" interface to one of my clients' web products. To do this, all I needed was a fairly small XML-lookin' text file. Some vendor-specific javascript manhandles Mozilla browsers into fetching this file and installing it.

Wanna see the file? Here's an expurgated version of it:

<search
version="7.1"
name="ClientSearch"
description="ClientSearch"
action="http://example.com/perl/find"
searchForm="http://example.com/search_form.html"
method="GET" >
<input name="term" user="">

<interpret>
</search>

<browser
update="http://example.com/plugin.src"
updateIcon="http://example.com/images/favicon.ico"
updateCheckDays="3"
>

Find out more at mycroft.

Sadly, the Google search bar in Apple's Safari isn't nearly so easily extended. There's no config file to change, nor javascript to facilitate this change. It's true that there's acid search plugin, but Apple should follow Mozilla's lead on this one.

I miss MarkovBlogger. It could easily of churned out an entry as insipid as this without my attention. Perhaps I look into getting unpaid college interns to do this blog for me.