http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=306273


in reply to a Mozilla Firebird searchplugin for Perlmonks

This is most excellent, boo_radley! ++. No more waiting for the initial page to load before I can begin searching.

Sweet stuff, indeed.

Update: The following will allow you to search CPAN.

# cpan search <search name="CPAN" description="Search CPAN " method="GET" action="http://search.cpan.org/search" > <input name="query" user> <interpret browserResultType="result" charset = "UTF-8" > </search>

If things get any worse, I'll have to ask you to stop helping me.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: a Mozilla Firebird searchplugin for Perlmonks (or)
by tye (Sage) on Nov 11, 2003 at 18:40 UTC

    I don't find node= very useful for searching in most cases.

    One day I will learn more about interactions between browser caches and dynamic pages and might get PM to issue more useful dates in its headers. For now, I've told my browser to just never refetch a page if it has it in its cache (which sometimes causes me problems because I forget to refresh an old page *sigh* -- but the trade-off is a net win so far) because this prevents me waiting 20 seconds to revisit a PM page I just visited a short while ago (or months ago, in fact).

    This means that I can select my PM bookmark and then click the "super search" link and not wait for PM at all.

    For those who don't want to put up with lots of stale pages, you can save super search's HTML to a local file, add a <base href="http://perlmonks.org/?"> in the <head> section, and you've now got a local, fast access point to a working PM search form.

    If you put the <base ...> before the <link ...>s, then your browser will use the CSS from PM (which it may decide to refetch). So might want to remove those <link ...>s or put the <base ...> after them, which will make your form look a little stark but it will still work. Or you could grab the CSS and put that in a local file...

    Just a couple other ways to do it...

                    - tye
Searching CPAN
by cleverett (Friar) on Nov 12, 2003 at 10:14 UTC
    Not that searching CPAN has any point to it: I have reason to believe that I'm a pretty fair hand at querying search engines like google, but searching CPAN feels, well, futile.

    I get radically higher success rates asking (OK, begging) for pointers to a module on various online fora.

    I think other Perlers most likely won't use whatever language I use to describe a problem, so I'm not going search on the keywords they use in their docs.

    Not to mention that sometimes I don't know what I don't know, and a module implementing a technology to solve my problem might very well exist on CPAN and not knowing that a particular technology/technique exists makes it pretty hard to look for it on CPAN.