Every web site needs a site search. Period.
This from one of the issues stated in Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into Accessibility.
I did not implement it when I did a redesign as the search function implemented by MT made it difficult to adopt the search results to my site design. Thankfully, through Mike Davidson’s entry, I found the solution that will bridge MT’s perl implementation of search with php that will allow me to skin it however I like.
h6. searching for the solution
The solution for this is from the orangehairedboy and you can get the whole chunk of it from his easy-to-follow tutorial. So with some customising of my own, I can display my search result in any form I like.
h6. acronyms and abbreviations
Is HTML an acronym or an abbreviation? According to here it is an abbreviation. But that’s not so much the point here. But when we code, we should try our best to give them their due credits by wrapping them in proper <acronym> or <abbr> tags. Tagging them will improve accessibility as browsers that recognises those tags will display a tooltip with the definition. It also allows screen readers to read out the full word rather than just speaking out “H” “T” “M” “L”. At present, people seldom use <abbr> tag as it is not supported in IE Windows although work arounds are available.
But it would be a hassle to add <acronym title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</acronym> everytime you want to write HTML. So that’s where Google comes in, leading me to this tutorial by Garrett Murray who used two plugins, MTPerlScript and MTMacro by Brad Choate to automate the process.
h6. frequently typed links
Now that I can automate the tagging of acronyms and abbreviations, I thought, maybe I can do the same to tag words that I frequently link to. And a look at Garrett’s MT link category showed that he already had one for this. He used the same idea behind tagging acronyms and now, typing Power Mac will link me to the Power Mac product page at Apple automatically without typing out the URL.
h6. in conclusion
I realised I’m lazy. Always finding solutions to automate this…automate that. but heck. it saves me time, so why not?
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