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Ask, and ye shall receive…

About a month ago I wrote here about something I’d dearly love to have: a plugin for the Firefox search toolbar that would specifically allow me to search only the contents of my personal Furl archive.

Well, just in time for Christmas, the friendly, enterprising, and generous German developer Christian Spannagel created exactly what I’d asked for. He created a Furl My Archive plugin! I helped him test it, and it works exactly as I’d hoped.

Now you can try it too…

DOWNLOAD THE PLUGIN FROM MOZDEV. Be sure you get the one that says “My Furl Archive” – the one simply called “Furl” is something else. After you install the plugin, go to the Furl site and log in. That’s how the plugin will know which archive to search.

Here’s why I like this plugin:

First of all, I use Furl a lot – so much so that my colleague Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette (a recent Furl convert) has dubbed me “Furl Gurl.” It’s become a crucial tool for any online research that I do. I like it because it allows me to save a copy of any web page into my personal archive, and the full content of everything I save is searchable.

So this means that if I’m asked to do an article on, say, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, I can easily find an excellent analysis of EPACT’s key provisions which I’d first seen months earlier. All I have to do is go into my Furl archive and search for “energy bill.”

Now, the drag used to be that I used to have to visit the Furl site, log in, and access my archive simply to conduct a search of items I’d stored there. That was a hassle.

I like my search to be immediate, built right into my browser. This is why I’ve become such a fan of the Firefox search toolbar – it allows me to conduct searches of many of my favorite online resources without having to directly visit the site. When you do as many searches as I do, that’s a real time-saver.

Alternatively, I could use the Furl toolbar (provided by Furl). This isn’t bad. However, I have the smallest Mac iBook laptop available. My screen is pretty small. Any extra toolbar consumes additional space in my browser window. I didn’t want to have to install an extra toolbar just to search one service. That didn’t seem worth the permanent sacrifice of space to me. (Just my personal opinion, of course – other folks really like the Furl toolbar.)

Now, the Furl toolbar provides several ways to search Furl. That’s cool, but really the only Furl search I perform frequently is of my own archive. So the Furl toolbar is overkill for me. At the same time, it’s “underkill” because the “my archive” option in the Furl toolbar takes me to the Furl site. Granted, it does land me right at the main page for my archive, where I can do my search. However, like I said earlier, that’s an extra step I’d rather avoid. I wanted to search my Furl archive right from my existing search toolbar, not have to mess with Furl’s site just to do the search.

I did have the Furl toolbar installed until recently, because it was at least a serviceable option, if not exactly what I wanted.

…But then, a couple of days ago, I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 – a pretty major upgrade. When I upgraded, my Furl toolbar disappeared. Apparently it’s not yet compatible with Firefox 1.5 – although I’m sure Furl is working on that. To be fair, some of my other extensions and plugins also weren’t happy with Firefox 1.5, too. This is one of the common tradeoffs of open-source software. If you use open-source software, you learn to roll with that.

Anyway, Christian’s “Furl My Archive” search plugin is definitely happy with Firefox 1.5. And since it’s exactly what I want, I won’t be re-installing the Furl toolbar.

So again, I’m not dissing the Furl toolbar. It’s fine for people who want what it does. But I’m glad that Christian supplied me with a different and more appropriate option. And I understand from him that the folks at Furl have given it their blessing.

So if you’re a Firefox user (and if you haven’t tried Firefox, you should!) and if you use Furl extensively, I recommend that you try Christian’s plugin. He did a very good job.