Mine is here.  The biggest change is I’ve gone for the look of the new Windows 7 Content view for files and folders … I like it very much.

In addition I have removed most of the excess whitespace, added hover effects, and added tooltip info to images.  In addition there are custom icons for some different filetypes, and it’s easy to change those.

There are also a couple interesting statistics at the bottom.

Download the source here (requires 7zip or a tool that can extract .7z files to use).

Shockingly IE8RC1 renders it correctly without requiring any hacks.  I did not test it with IE7 (I’m scared to, given the semi-hackish way I got the folder/file lists working without tables).  The latest versions of Gecko, Webkit, and Opera all handle it fine… and of course Gecko and Webkit get fancy rounded borders too.

For the future I might add some javascript in to allow for custom sorting and maybe different views for files/folders… who knows.  But that would require coding a lot of the template over in JavaScript.

Windows 7 introduces a new feature which allows you to add search engines right to Windows Explorer.  It’s not as convenient as in a web browser (the search engine is represented by a file somewhere on your computer that you download) but it works.

It uses the standard OpenSearch spec (with their own Microsoft twist, of course!) to query search engines which already conform to this standard.  Basically you can pass a script your search terms and get them back in an RSS or Atom feed which Explorer or any OpenSearch compatible client can parse and display how they like.

Google doesn’t offer any such feed.  So I made a PHP script to parse the HTML output Google feeds web browsers (using this library) and spit out an OpenSearch RSS feed.  Works pretty good.

Had a few annoying problems along the way… a big one was I couldn’t always get Explorer to parse it and it doesn’t tell you why.  For some reason I didn’t think to try to view the feed in Internet Explorer to get a more detailed error report.  Turns out Google pages use a different encoding than what I was marking the XML file with, and that was causing feeds with smart quotes to annoy Explorer.

Anyways it’s working now.  You can try it out with this.  Download and double click to have Explorer open a search window.  This DOES proxy the results through my server so don’t use that if you plan on using it regularly… here’s the source code.  Go put it on your own server.  Just remember to change the urls in all the files to point to your server instead of mine.

There’s an extra file, opendescription.xml.  AFAIK it’s not NEEDED for Explorer but it’s part of the OpenSearch spec so there it is.  This should be compliant with the spec, so not just Explorer can use it.

Sooo… hi everyone visitiing.  You all have probably used more bandwidth in a week than my site has ever seen before… so thanks.  If you’re here that probably means you navigated one level up from my kill notification generator out of curiosity, so let me be your tour guide.

Check out my links on the right side and on the top of this page.  My “Projects” page has downloadable apps I’ve written, including a minimalist automated screenshot tool and a portable app compacting tool.  I also have a image index script which I overhauled based on garry’s.

I’m also looking for employment at the moment.  If you or someone you know is looking for entry-level desktop application programmers or web programmers in the area of Central New Jersey, I’d appreciate it if you’d check out my résumé, see if my skills are something you/they might need, and send yourself/them a link.  I’d appreciate it.