Finding Flex Facts Faster

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so today, firefox decided to die a death on me. I choked it doing some Flex debugging and as a result I lost the functionality in my search bar. This got me thinking about what would really be useful for me is a way to search the places I usually go for flex info – the livedocs and the flexcoders mailing list. What I’ve ended up with is a quick way to search both these resources at the same time…

So, the first thing I did was to create a couple of specialised search bar engines using google. My first thought was to try and get google to search two site: locations in the same query, but it just wont let you… as it turned out, the solution I came up with I think is more usable.

The first thing you will want to do is install the search plugins. You can get the flexcoders one here, and the livedocs one here. When you have installed them, restart firefox and your search engines should now appear in the searchbar at the top right of your window

The next thing I wanted to do is combine the functionality of these two together. After a few minutes digging, I found that the advanced search sidebar plugin for firefox does exactly what I need it to do. If you dont have it, you can get it here. When you have the search sidebar installed, open it up and in the ‘within’ dropdown, select ‘Edit Categories…’ Under the category dropdown, click New… create a category called ‘Flex’ and add the two flex search engines.

Hey presto, you can now search across livedocs and flexcoders in one action…