Create and share search services

A couple of days ago we added a function that I think could be a very useful one at http://my.agent55.com - This enables you to create your own custom search categories and add any search engines to it, making it possible for you to create and share your own search-service.

We got good reactions on it and I would really like to hear YOUR oppinion on this, so dont hesistate, try it out today.

Until next time...

Agent 55 Merchandise!

Now we have made it possible for our visitors to purchase Agent 55 products. That means that anyone can buy a t-shirt, a mousepad and much more products with the Agent 55 logotype and/or the Agent-silhuettes. We have two different webshops, one for people living in Sweden only (polyshop.se) and one for people living in the USA and the rest of the world (cafepress.com) so feel free to visit them and buy some nice products. I just received our "test"-products yesterday, and I can tell you that the shadow-effect with the silhuettes looks really cool, especially if you take a photo of the product it looks like the shadow of the silhuette gets inside the product in a sort of 3D-illusion. Agent 55 does not make any profit of anything you may buy from these webshops, so the price is as low as its gets. We just think it is nice if anyone in another country would wear a Agent 55 sweater... :)

Visit the Swedish store at polyshop.se/agent55/
Visit the International store at cafepress.com/agent55/

Textout with PHP, which one is really the fastest?

(This is a bit off-topic from Agent55). The other day I saw a discussion on a forum about what php-code to use if you want your script to be as FAST as possible. The discussion was about whether "print" or "echo" should be used, and I thought that probably the <php ?> tags would be faster to use than either of print and echo.

Which is faster? (With faster I mean the one that executes in less time)

Hi <?=$username?> !!!

or

<?echo "Hi $username !!!"?>

Ofcourse I had to make an empirical test, to know for sure what method was the fastest, So I hacked up these two (in functionality) identical code-snippets.

The "echo-method"

<?$username="test";$time_start = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<1000000;$i++){?><?echo "Hi $i $username !!!"?><?}
$time_end = microtime(true);
?><?=($time_end - $time_start)?>

The "inline-method"

<?$username="test";$time_start = microtime(true);
for($i=0;$i<1000000;$i++){?>Hi <?=$i?> <?=$username?> !!!<?}
$time_end = microtime(true);
?><?=($time_end - $time_start)?>

The results
I have tested these two php-snittets in two single php-files on my test-server and the results are conclusive. Not ONCE did the "echo-method" prove to be faster than the inline-method. In my particular test-case, the "inline-method" was around 0.5 seconds faster than the "echo-method"

Conclusion
So what is the conclusion of this then? Well, in a normal php-development case you won't have to care about these two differences because in my test-code I did 1 miljon repeats of the code to get a difference of only half a second between the two, so this is only a test of the principle.

What I do know is that the "inline-method" is a much more appreciated way to create dynamic content, at least by almost any web-designer I have talked to about this.
So now when it proved to be slightly faster than the "echo-method", I see no reason to use the "echo-method" any longer generally speaking, there will always be exceptions to this ofcourse.

What do you think? Feel free to use the code-snippets above to test them on your own server.

Link to us and FAQ

Today we added a new page with a couple of "link to us" options, for anyone who would want to link to Agent55 (or any other site in the Network). Just visit it and add a link to Agent55 on your website.

For the first time, we also have updated the FAQ section as we got quite alot questions and we thought that it would be nice to publish them here.

Now, Search and enjoy!

Lost of things ...

... has happened since last time I blogged.

• We started a UK section of Agent55, and that means that people living in the United Kingdom can do local searches for the web, jobs, private citizens, news and much more
• We have added more engines and categorys, so now we have over 300 search engines in our files, making Agent55 the worlds most extensive meta search service/engine.
• We started a meta search for Kids, named metaKIDZ.com using only "safe" search engines for the kids to use when browsing the net. We removed all links from it so it would be more plain and simple.

Also even more very soon more local sites are coming from us, stay tuned!

How to insert working javascript-source in blogs (and not having them destroyed by the blogware)

The other day I wrote a "cool" javascript (The script, when pasted into any webpage, will make every link on the page to zoom out and fall into place, hard to explain but a really neat effect IMHO) I made while playing around with javascript bookmarklets and Filters in Internet Explorer.

So i thought why not share this with other people and actually create some kind of challenge so people would contribute and make even cooler javascripts. So I wrote a blog about it and was about to save it to blogger.com when the trouble started. I replaced every " with a ' in the script so that the (a href) tags would not break when I inserted the script.

Blogger did not like javascript
When I tried to post the entire contents of the javascript (so people would be able to copy and test the script) BLOGGER just cut my javascript-tag off so I was not able to post links with "javascript:" in them. I guess they dont want javascript hacks making their images flying around... ;)

Wordpress maybe?
Damn! I need to find another blogger-site then, I thought, and registered at Wordpress.com . Now, Wordpress did allow my javascript-link to show but it did cut it off and made the script totally unworkable so I had to find another solution.

I downloaded the Wordpress blogsoftware from wordpress.org and installed it at my own server. Now it actually allowed me to insert ( textarea ) tags to contain the javascript source, BUT for some reason, each time I saved the blog, the EDIT-area got CUT off exactly where I put the < /textarea > tag. So each time I saved a draft copy of my blog, all text below the javascript code disappeared! I guess that Wordpress uses (textarea) tags in their editor-window aswell. :/

My solution
Now, the wordpress blogware DID allow me to use my own HTML tags, with javascript-links and it only messed up some special characters in links (replaced spaces in with %20 and so on) after saving a draft. So the solution to this problem was this: I wrote the blog in wordpress WITHOUT inserting the javascript-code and saved the page (draft).

Now I switched to html-code view and inserted the javascript code at the appropriate places so I had the complete html-source in the editor, Now I selected all the html-code and copied it to the clipboard and pasted it in a textfile that I keep stored locally.
After that I hit the "save" button, And there it was: The blogpage was saved correctly with the javascript-code intact. :)

How to edit the blogpage then?
Now when I wanted to edit this particular blog, For the javascript-code not to be ruined, I had to:

1. Load the page up for edit mode
2. Switch to html-code view. Copy the html-code from my textfile and paste it into the html-code view.
3. Switch to design-view and make the changes.
4. Switch back to html-code view and select & copy the html-code and paste it into the textfile.
5. Save the page.

If you want to see the script for yourself (and maybe write a cooler one) you can go to http://blog.skbg.net

until next time...

Now you can select what search engines to search

Today (well yesterday actually) I added a function so that our users themselves can decide what search-engines they do want to use when searching with Agent55 by simply clicking a checkbox. If you want to try this feature out the go to the Engines page and select what engines you want to use.

This combined with the one click Javascript search button will make a great team! :)

Happy searching!

New search button. Search over 200 engines with a click

Today I have added the possibility for users to add an "Agent55 search button" to their browser.

When added, users can search the whole Agent55 wide range of search-engines, by just clicking the search button. Included are some also smart "short cuts" that makes searching even easier for the Agent55 users.

The searchbutton is written in javascript and works for InternetExplorer 6 & 7, Firefox 2 and Opera 9 - So just go to http://agent55.com/?p=addsb and add the searchbutton to your browser and experience the simpleness of searching them all.

(Users of IE7 and Firefox can also install the Agent55 search as an search provider/Open Search engine should they want to.)

"News/Log" added

Yesterday I added a function on the startpage (http://agent55.com) that shows what has happened in the search-engine database a specifik day. It shows: new categories added, new search engines that has been added and what search engines that has been removed (and the reason why it was removed, eg. "uses popups", "spyware" etc.)

It can really show you what is going on at Agent55.

More features will be added shortly...

Does Firefox crash for you?

About ten days ago I discovered a really evil and nasty bug that totally crashed the Mozilla Firefox webbrowser and after some hard work I managed to remove the crashing symptom of my site.

On popular demand I have restored an old backup where the Firefox-crashing bug still is present and set up a little test site for you all to test if your Firefox (combined with your Windows-version) crashes. It seems that the only variable is not what Firefox version you are running, but also there seems to depend on something else, it may be a windows driver or something like that. Maybe it depends on what Add-ons are installed in Firefox.

If you are running Firefox go to http://ffcrash.agent55.com and test it, and please post a comment about the results here. Dont forget to mention what version of Firefox you have and what operating system version you are running.

Weird bug crashes Firefox totally without warning

This site uses a lot of DHTML-objects and the purpose was to make this work for IE 6/7, Firefox and Opera with the priority in that order. After months of coding and testing, I felt that this site was pretty stable, and so I asked my friends to help me test this site out.

After 2 hours I got a text message at my MSN messenger where a friend claims that my site makes his Firefox (2.01) to totaly Crash! No error message, no nothing, it just crashes and closes all Firefox windows opened. I ask what he did to make this crash and he says "I just clicked on the Find!-button twice". OMG! I immediately start trying to reproduce this bug, and find out that my Firefox also crashes, sometimes. Not every time I click the Find!-button, but every other time approximately.

Now I was forced to start dividing up my code in pieces and start commenting out code, to narrow down the bug, and as you can imagine my Firefox crashed many many many times that day and the day after.

Eventually I narrowed the bug down and found out that it was something in my main .css-file that caused Firefox to unexpectedly crash! At the end I finaly found what was causing Firefox to crash. It was a CSS-class that had "position: absolute" as an attribute and this class was used by the many DHTML objects used in my code.

I guess this error is some kind of buffer-overflow bug thats causing FF to die. So to solve this problem I had to change the actual CSS-class from absolute to static, and then later on in javascript-code, I could change the position to be absolute. And FINALY, Firefox did not crash so horribly that it had done before. So bevare developers if you experience this Firefox crash bug, try commenting out your (extensive) style-sheet.

If you have Firefox and want to test if your Firefox crashes, go here

New Layout

Almost from the very beginning of beta-testing Agent55 out beta-testers (close friends and colleagues of mine) pointed out to me that the design of Agent55 was not the best, to say it gently. I have now tried to change that and made a more "clean" layout of Agent55, trying to emphasize the "agent-feeling". What that now may be :)

So, today (only 4 days after launch) we will release the new layout of Agent55. Hope you like it as it is more clean and hopefully has a better layout than the last one...

Agent55 just launched

Hey hey, my first blog ever, so please bear with me.. :)

My name is Goran Johansson, I run a small company in Sweden called Awesume Interactive and the 17th of Janaury 2007 we released a site that we have been working on for about 2-3 months.

The site is called agent55 (agent55.com) and is a so called meta search engine, that means that it has no own search engine, but sends out requests to other search engines on the web and shows the results in two different views. Hard to explain, easier to try out. We have added about 15 different search-categories and more will be added with time. The categories at launch was: The Web, Images, Videos, Mp3/Audio, Shopping, Photos, Directories, Software, Subtitles and Bit-torrents. We also have a localized version of agent55 that is called Agent55 Sweden that searches only local swedish sites, such as best price, jobs, news, phone numbers etc.

I have put down quite a lot of work to make this site tick with all of the three big browsers, namely: Internet Explorer(6 & 7), Firefox(2+), Opera (9) and as any webdeveloper know DHTML together with the three musketeers (?) is a great hassle...

My thoughts with this blog is to inform you a little about the background of this site (and me) and also what is happening and what is gonna happen at the site, I can promise you that I have a lot of ideas for this site if it turns out well...

If you want you can visit the site, try it out a bit and give me your reactions.

Enough for now, More will come soon.

Best regards

Goran Johansson