crankygeek

gada-be FeedDemon Search definition

7:54 pm on 10.10.2005 Software FeedDemon, RSS

UPDATE – As I mention below in the comments, this search definition doesn’t work right now because gada.be isn’t returning RSS results. Hopefully this will be added as an option once Chris and Co. recover from their launch. When it is, I’ll update the definition and make sure that everyone who needs to know gets the word.

Nick points out that Chris Pirillo has launched a new metasearch service – gada.be.

So in my enthusiasm, I thought I’d create a FeedDemon search definition. I once asked Nick for a multi-engine search channel in FeedDemon and got shot down (for good reasons) but gada.be compensates for this pretty well.

So far the only problem is that FeedDemon is encoding the search parameters (”dot” as “%2E” and “dash” as “%2D”) which gives different results because gada.be treats the encoded characters as part of the string.

A couple bits of feedback for Chris as well.

• How about a “Go” or “Search” or some other action on the search form? Form submission via an onchange isn’t that friendly, especially since you can’t onchange to the already selected item.
• It seems that I can’t enter search terms directly in the search form in the same format as expected in the URL. For example, entering chris.pirillo results in a URL of chrispirillo.gada.be. (Not 100% sure about this, actually, but I can’t repro again due to the site being so swamped.)
• Decoding the aforementioned encoded bits would be groovy.

Another limitation of implementing via a FeedDemon Search is that there isn’t a way to specify a separate parameter for limiting search types based on the “slug” (/b /i /p, etc.) or /opml. Advanced users could always edit the feed properties or could create a couple slightly modified Search definitions.

So, with limitations noted, here’s rev A of the FeedDemon gada.be search definition. For some reason that I don’t have the patience to look into, the link doesn’t work inside of FeedDemon. But you can download and double-click it to install into FeedDemon.

Another caveat – Chris is working out the availability/load-balancing issues right now in case you run into problems accessing the site.