[ANN] Ruby-doc.org search for your browser toolbar

[James Britt]

Thanks to Greg Whiteley, ruby-doc.org has a slick new feature.

I recently changed the search function on the site. The search covers
not just ruby-doc, but a number of other informative Ruby Web resources.
That part is not new; I had been using Rollyo to handle the aggregated
Web search.

Now, though, the search is powered by Google's custom search feature.
It's very, very nice (for one thing, search results are returned as a
page in the ruby-doc.org domain, rather than taking you off to some
other site), but the query URLs are way fugly. To remedy this, I hacked
up some mod_rewrite magic, so that one can search with a clean URL, as
in these examples:

http://www.ruby-doc.org/q/REXML
http://www.ruby-doc.org/q/RJS+partials

Greg took this a step further and created a browser search toolbar
auto-discovery file. Users of Firefox 2 and IE7 (and possibly others)
who visit the site should now see the search toolbar icon (usually in
the upper right of the browser) become highlighted.

Clicking the icon will then give you the option of adding the
ruby-doc.org search to your search toolbar.

Try it!

--
James Britt

http://www.ruby-doc.org - Ruby Help & Documentation
http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff
http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys

 

[James Edward Gray II]

Thanks to Greg Whiteley, ruby-doc.org has a slick new feature.

Forgive my subject change, but can I ask why the Core documentation
now includes most of the standard library as well? I think this has
hurt it's browsibilty.

James Edward Gray II

 

[James Britt]

Forgive my subject change, but can I ask why the Core documentation now
includes most of the standard library as well? I think this has hurt
it's browsibilty.

What's there is simply the output of running rdoc over the main source,
as has always been the case. There seem to have been changes in the
source code or the .document files.

I'd prefer to see no distinction at all, but have the docs be clear on
whether a given class/module/method is built-in, or requires 'requires'
on something, and so on. But, right now, the docs show, for example,
YAML methods as being built into core classes, such as Array. So there
is all sorts of confusion.

However, this may be a topic better discussed on the ruby-core or
ruby-doc lists.

--
James Britt

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is
not worth knowing."
- A. Perlis

 

[Rick DeNatale]

Greg took this a step further and created a browser search toolbar
auto-discovery file. Users of Firefox 2 and IE7 (and possibly others)
who visit the site should now see the search toolbar icon (usually in
the upper right of the browser) become highlighted.

Clicking the icon will then give you the option of adding the
ruby-doc.org search to your search toolbar.

Any chance that someone with the right mojo might help us poor
beknighted souls still running Firefox 1.5 with a less automatic way
to add it to the search engine list?

 

[botp]

Thanks to Greg Whiteley, ruby-doc.org has a slick new feature.
I recently changed the search function on the site. The search covers
not just ruby-doc, but a number of other informative Ruby Web resources.
That part is not new; I had been using Rollyo to handle the aggregated
Web search.
Now, though, the search is powered by Google's custom search feature.
It's very, very nice (for one thing, search results are returned as a
page in the ruby-doc.org domain, rather than taking you off to some
other site), but the query URLs are way fugly. To remedy this, I hacked
up some mod_rewrite magic, so that one can search with a clean URL, as
in these examples:
http://www.ruby-doc.org/q/REXML
http://www.ruby-doc.org/q/RJS+partials
Greg took this a step further and created a browser search toolbar
auto-discovery file. Users of Firefox 2 and IE7 (and possibly others)
who visit the site should now see the search toolbar icon (usually in
the upper right of the browser) become highlighted.
Clicking the icon will then give you the option of adding the
ruby-doc.org search to your search toolbar.

indeed. ruby-doc is getting better and better. great doc + great
language = who could ask for more. many thanks to ruby-doc team!

kind regards -botp