Miscellaneous

search.creativecommons.org screencast and i18n

By Mike Linksvayer

We’ve rolled out a few small changes to search.creativecommons.org:

• The part of the interface we control is now translatable, and has five languages enabled now — Afrikaans, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), English, and Japanese. You can suggest translations here.
• A screencast on using ccSearch with Firefox, including how to change your default search engine, and change it back.
• Run a default search when the user switches search tabs with no query entered.

You can browse and checkout the code (GPL licensed) from our source repository.

Further improvements we’re thinking about (patches welcome; see source info above):

• Conditionally show search engine tabs based on language. This requires us to learn of more CC-enabled search sites that allow filtering on license terms by changing the query URL. Look at (and add to) our wiki page on ccSearch integration for details.
• Conditionally show search engine tabs based on user preference.
• Provide some contextual help when user switches tabs without entering a query rather than running a default search.
• A complete re-thinking of the interface, including the possibility of a unified metasearch instead of search engine tabs.

Remember, the code is available and GPL’d, so you can run your own version (modulo our trademark policy) in addition to helping us improve ours.

Full post as published by Creative Commons.org on May 12, 2008 (boomark / email).