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SteveHoffman.TV Information

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Google Search Plugins

Thanks to our generous forum friend "jojopuppyfish", we have a set of Google search plugins to search our forum with. Google's search will likely return better results for many common forum searches, and these plugins let you add this search utility to your browser.

Here are details for adding the search plugin to your browser.

Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7: both of these browsers have an "auto discovery" mode that will detect the presence of a search plugin available for a website. When you are within our forum, you should see, in your browser, an option to add "SteveHoffman.tv" as a search option. In Firefox 2.0, drop down your list of search engines, and you should see Add SteveHoffman.tv among the choices.

Firefox 1.5: there is no automatic way to install the plugins, but you can download the PNG and SRC file pair as a .zip file from this link:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/searchplugins/shtv.zip

Unzip both files and put them in the "searchplugins" directory in your Mozilla directory, and restart Firefox to begin using it.

Other browsers: if your favorite browser is compatible with the OpenSearch plugin style, it should pick up the plugin via the auto discovery mode. If not, click the button below:

Or, visit this page:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/searchplugins/searchplugin.php

Worst case, you can access the XML file here:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/searchplugins/searchplugin.php

RSS How-To

Our forum has the ability to output data as an RSS feed. What this does is send you a list of recent thread titles that you may click on to read in our forum. Most RSS newsreaders will retrieve the latest feed at an interval that you specify. Setting it up in your application should be as easy as providing the URL explained below, with the appropriate options. (Note: the file we are using is actually an enhanced version which gives you the ability to change retrieval options in the URL.)

For a default RSS retrieval, you can use the following URL:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/fps_external.php

What this will give you is the 15 newest threads created in the forum, in the RSS 0.9x format.

Command Line Options

In order to add or change additional options, you need to add them to the URL. Here is an example:

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/fps_external.php?type=rss&qty=15&items=active&html=yes

In this example, you add a question mark after the filename fps_external.php, and then add your options; each option is separated by an ampersand ( & ). The default value of an option will be used if you do not specify the option in the command line. Here is an explanation of those options:

qty=	Lets you specify the number of thread titles to retrieve. The default value is 15 thread titles retrieved; you can specify fewer titles, or as many as 30, with this option.
items=	By default, you will only retrieve the titles of new threads that have been created. If you would like add threads with recent activity to your retrieval (meaning, existing threads with new posts), add items=active to the URL.
type=	By default, you will receive newsfeeds using the RSS 0.92 specification. You may specify type=rss in your URL to specify this level of RSS, or leave it out. If you want to be RSS 1.0 compliant, use type=rss1. To be RSS 2.0 compliant, use type=rss2.
forumids=	By default, you will receive a feed of all of the forums that are publicly viewable. To limit this further, you can specify forum IDs to retrieve, separated by commas. So to limit your forums to, say, Music Corner, Audio Hardware and Visual Arts, enter forumids=2,5,36 in your URL.
html=	Advanced option: you can use this to strip or retain HTML special characters. By default, special HTML characters are stripped, which is equivalent to html=no. You can choose to turn this on by using html=yes.

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