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.