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I got down and dirty with php this Saturday. After seeing what Peter Cooper did with Ruby, I wanted a similar search engine for Digital Photography. So I cobbled one together using the google coop.

I spent about 8 hours working on this. I was in the zone. I spent a lot of time trying to reverse engineer the google stuff. At the time I was building this page, parts of the google coop page were broken. Basically,

1. The look and feel section for the engine stopped working
2. I could not update the list of sites for the search engine
3. I could not make changes to the search engine description

I also learnt how to create a search plugin for Firefox/Mozilla. I was amazed how easy it is. It is so easy that you can write a script which takes a search URL (after you type in your query) for a search engine to create a plugin for firefox. While I am on this, IE7 does exactly that. I dont know what they were thinking. They expect a user to search for a predetermined string and then copy the URL somewhere. Crazy two step process! What they dont know is a lot of users dont know what a URL is. I have no idea why they didn’t implement something like Mozilla. I guess thats their way of securing the browser. Give me a one click plugin installer please. Ok away from my rant.

I was pretty impressed with how easy it is to use PHP. Deploying Ruby on rails requires a PhD in configuring Apache. Lucky for me I’ve played around with Apache enough to know how to configure it. I would definitely use PHP again for a small, quick project like this.

The artwork is not mine. I can’t do computer art if my life depended on it. The icon is from The Tango Desktop Project

Visit Digital Photography Search

Here is a screenshot.