Google search boxes and other bits

This is going to be long and disorganized—I apologize in advance. Only read on if you were interested in the Google search box for your website.

Go to http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ to sign up for a customized search box. It is going to ask for your domain name—put in what you have so far (e.g., students.niu.edu/~z12345/engl) because you can always change it later. You’ll be able to go in and choose how you want it to look and get the code for that particular look. Don’t be intimidated! It’s not that bad!

For example, this is the source code for the Google search box at www.english.org:

Google Search

Web Site

I left in all the location information, i.e., tables and such. (Note that I did not create this code—there are some sloppy bits that I don’t approve of now that I see them, but it works anyway! I probably won’t go in to clean it up because I don’t want to fix something that isn’t broken, but I’m sure that after Eric’s lecture the other week we can all see some things that could be improved here.)

If you have any questions about how to make this work for you, I will do my best to help. The Google page should be pretty helpful, too, if you look around on it.

Here is a page that has some interesting & useful tips on this subject: http://www.askdavetaylor.com/how_can_i_add_a_google_search_box_to_my_web_site.html. I don’t recommend just copying their code and using it, because you’ll be missing out on bunches of perks, but I agree with them that their code is very clean and neat. You can always modify yours with this in mind.

Below the Google search box at www.english.org, you’ll notice the Adobe download information. If you will be using any .pdf files, it is a good idea to go to http://www.adobe.com/svg/license.html and apply for a license to use the Adobe logo so that your users can download the latest version of Acrobat and so that you can get little .pdf graphics to mark which links will open as .pdf files instead of other web pages. It is rather inconsiderate to create a link that opens to a file like this without somehow indicating it to the user—they don’t like those types of surprises.

Good luck and have fun! And please let me know if I've glossed over something so it doesn't make sense. It's already been a very long weekend for me!