#search

Simple Search Operators

I’ve long wanted to be able to do some simple, operated-powered searches within WordPress (especially relevant in a project I’m working on at Automattic). After a conversation with Allen, where he wanted to do the same thing, I figured I’d just whip up a quick plugin to see how hard it’d be. Turns out the answer is “not very”.

Simple Search Operators is a quick plugin that expands the functionality of the default search system in WordPress so that you can use a few useful operators (might look at adding some more at some point) [all links in the following list go to live searches on this site, using that operator]:

  • author:beau will limit results to posts written by the author with the username/slug ‘beau’
  • tag:burrito will only return posts which are tagged with ‘burrito’
  • category:posts (or cat:posts) to search for posts categorized as ‘posts’
  • tag:burritofriday cancun author:beau to search for posts containing ‘cancun’, written by ‘beau’, tagged as ‘burritofriday’

Some caveats:

  • Not heavily tested! May well be capable of generating server-melting queries
  • Only supports one of each operator for now
  • Operators and freeform searches may be combined (e.g.: “tag:burrito cancun”)
  • Does not support spaced strings for operators, so you can only do things where a no-space string attached to an operator will get you what you want
  • Because of the way it manipulates query variables, might mess with other plugins or themes in adverse ways. Like I said, not heavily tested.
  • Not available via the WP Plugin Repo yet; will get it up there once it’s baked a little bit

If you’d like to give it a shot, please do. If you’d like to add more operators; shoot me a pull request and we can expand this out a bit.

Twitter’s Missing Features

I’ve been sketching some random thoughts and plans for a new Twitter client, and rather than restrict it to my notebooks and condemn it to the fate of so many other ideas of mine that never see realization, I’m putting my wish-list for what a decent Twitter client should allow me to do here. Feel free to roll these into another client and let me know so that I can just use it, rather than have to build it 🙂

Read the full list after the break

Twitter Search Bookmarklet

Throughout the day, I’m likely to search Twitter a number of times. Being the lazy person that I am, I got sick of opening a new tab, typing search.twitter.com, hitting enter, waiting for the page, then typing my term and waiting for results. I already have a couple of other bookmarklets that I use all the time (one for loading up a Google Map, one for jumping to a PHP function name in the online reference), so I figured I’d knock up something to search Twitter. I’m using Firefox on a Mac, YMMV.

  1. Bookmark any page (seriously, any page).
  2. Put that bookmark into your Bookmarks Toolbar.
  3. Right click it and select Properties
  4. Change the Name to something like “Search Twitter”
  5. Change the Location to this (copy and paste it): 
    javascript:var%20d=document,w=window,e=w.getSelection,k=d.getSelection,x=d.selection,s=(e?e():(k)?k():(x?x.createRange().text:0));if(!s.length){s=prompt('Search%20Twitter:','');}if(s){document.location.href='http://search.twitter.com/search?q='+escape(s);}else{void(0);}
  6. Save Changes

That’s it. Now click that link in your Bookmark Toolbar and it’ll prompt you for a search string. Enter anything and hit OK. If you happen to have some text on the page selected, it’ll automatically search for that text. Voila – Twitter Search.