Sherlock Plug-ins

In fact, I thought it was so cool I started writing plug-ins within weeks of the release of MacOS 8.5. I've forgotten how many I've done, for friends' personal web sites, neat sites I personally liked to visit, etc., but the major ones are listed here, and are free for you to download.

Ongoing focus (niche?)

	The University of Texas at Austin Search The University's main site
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I grew up in Austin, and got a B.A. from UT in '84, so I'm a Longhorn (teasip) through and through. As a result, this is the first one I really spent time on, doing up the icon, etc. (The Bevo I swiped from the athletic department's page and resized.) It was completed in December '98.

I had it distributed through the apple-donuts website, and from there it went on to one of the MacAddict CDs and who knows where else.

It seems to be popular. For a while now, update queries for this plugin have accounted for roughly twenty percent of the hits for the site it's stored on, from December 99 through mid-April 00, even though it didn't seem to work any more! Heh. So I fixed it. It would be nice if somebody would tell me these things. I wish there were an 'official' version, but for right now it seems this is it.

	The Library of Congress Search the library's main site
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Heady from the "fame" of my first attempt, I was eager to submit many more plug-ins to the apple-donuts site. However, this one didn't pass muster. It generates an error in Sherlock Tester 1.0 (a fine program, and indispensible for anyone who's writing plug-ins). This program had been adapted by the admins at apple-donuts as a standard, and this plug-in has a raw linefeed character in its code that the tester registers as an error.

After some email discussion with stairways tech support and Peter Lewis himself, the hard fact hit home: with a raw linefeed, this plug-in won't be compatible with any future Sherlock-type programs for Unix. So I gave up on submitting it to apple-donuts. (It's probably just as well--the a.d. site hasn't been updated since May 1999.)

Nevertheless, it works with Sherlock, and until the Library decides to alter their search engine (which they haven't done since this plug-in was written in early 1999), it won't work without it. So I'm leaving it in for the time being. As with all the plug-ins, you're using it at your own risk, anyway.

(Sherlock Tester has since been integrated into Anarchie 3.7. This is, and always has been, a top-of-the-line Internet tool. Best of all you can try it for free!)

	Mac OS Planet Search this Macintosh-related site's articles, etc.
	Download the plug-in	Visit the site

The proprietor of this site, which at that time was called MACOSWORLD.com, got a search engine early on, and seemed eager to obtain a Sherlock plug-in for it, so this was a fun project for me. Actually, the domain change to macosplanet was the first time I needed to test Sherlock's update capabilities in a real-world situation, and apparently it went off without a hitch (although nobody bothered to tell me about that one ahead of time, either). Since then, the website has apparently stopped distributing the plug-in, and I don't exactly know the cause of that, either, but here it is if you'd like it.

	Applelinks Search the AppleLinks web site.
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If you visited this site between 4/10/00 and now, forget what I said. To Applelinks, I owe an apology.

I think the Applelinks folks are probably good people. (If maybe a bit overworked.)

	Wesleyan College (added 7/21/00) Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia
	Download the plug-in	Visit the site

I used to work at Wesleyan. Wonderful place.

As with most freeware, these plug-ins include no warranty, express or implied. I cannot guarantee that they will work to your satisfaction, or indeed that they will even work at all. By using them, you agree to not hold me responsible for any data loss or any other loss which might occur as a result (although such an eventuality is extremely remote).

The plug-ins contained on this page are Copyright © 2000 John Robinson. You may use them freely, with one stipulation: you may alter them for your own use (drink), you may redistribute them (drive), but you may not alter and then redistribute them (drink and drive).