One Big Library.

I spent an unexpected amount of time during a meeting today trying to get a little search interface I wrote to properly support opensearch autodiscovery and to get the "you can install this search in firefox 2 and ie7" thingy working. Then I just did the same for this blog's opensearch interface. In case you want to do the same (get browsers to autodiscover and two-click install search plugins for your opensearch targets), here are some hints. Note, though, that they might be firefox2-specific.

• Follow the Firefox troubleshooting tips. All of them, they all matter, it seems.
• I might have just started from an old version, but the drupal opensearch module wasn't emitting the opensearch description element Url with text/html info as indicated as required in the troubleshooting tips.
• The "Unable to install your search plugin thingy" error message is confoundingly unhelpful. To get useful debugging info in firefox2, go to "about:config" and enable browser.search.log (just double-click it). Then open Tools > Error Console and clear it before each time you attempt to install the search plugin. Read the output closely and go from there until the error message goes away and it works. Then you probably want to go back to about:config and disable browser.search.log again.

Here's the thing: getting opensearch-based search plugins for your browser can be a huge win for the visibility and usefulness of your resources to your user community. It's easy and it's great to have your stuff right there, an easy query away all the time. But if you want to make it easily auto-discovered, you have to get all the details exactly right *for* them.

That said, I'm not 100% certain it works in ie7. If anybody has it handy, tell me if it works for you?