Googling From Blosxom

I’ve made a few changes to my copy of Blosxom to add the little “Google” link you see at the end of this entry. I’ve seen this on other blogs here and there so I decided to add it to mine. It consists of a subroutine called buildGoogle that takes the second line of each story file and builds the Google URL with the query string built from your keywords. The second line of the file will only be used as keywords if the line starts with KW:. If it starts with anything other than that, it will be included as part of the body. For example, a file with this

KW: blosxom perl blog

as its second line will produce this

 | Google

To include the link itself in your stories, edit your story.html and add $google wherever you want the link to show up. If the link was not built because you didn’t have a KW: line, then nothing will show up. This is from my story.html. Notice it comes right after code creating the perma-link.

 #$google 

Here is the patch if you would like to use it.

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Well, it’s 00:29 on December 26… Christmas is officially over. I always get bummed after Christmas; the lights don’t seem as pretty and the tree seems lonely and sad. We had a great Christmas here. My son, Thomas got everything he had asked for and more. My wife and I got a nice new digital camera that I’ve been trying out. Very nice and easy to use. I just wish it didn’t store its images in JPG format. It’s a 4 megapixel camera so the jpeg-iness probably won’t really be a problem, I just don’t like lossy compression without a conscious decision to use it…

Anyway, so Christmas was good for us. It was good in another respect too: I got my laptop setup with Red Hat Linux. I’m using their default window manager, which is built on/with/is Gnome. Looks great. Feels pretty good. Still a bit tricky to do things that should be easy like adding icons to the main menu… I did get it working with my LinkSys WPC11 wireless LAN card. I can pretty easily switch between a hard line and the wireless, which is nice. I installed the latest Mozilla, Eclipse and Java dev kit, so I’m really cooking now. I still need to install DB2 and WebLogic Server 7 to get my day-job project going. (I just got JBoss going…)

Then for fun I need to update Ruby, Python and the myriad Eclipse plugins that I use regularly. It’s taking time, but I’m pretty happy with the results so far.