Nathan Parry

How to set up the Delicious plugin for QSB

Update: This version of the plugin has been superseded by version 0.2

———

Right now setting up my Delicious plugin isn’t the easiest thing in the world - so here are some illustrated step-by-step instructions!

1. Download and unzip the plugin (Available here)

2. Copy the plugin file to the right directory.  This will be /Users/<your_user_name>/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box/PlugIns

3. Copy the plist file to the right directory.  This will be /Users/<your_user_name>/Library/Application Support/Google/Quick Search Box

4. Open the plist file with TextEdit.  Put in your Delicious username and password and save your changes.

5. Restart Google Quick Search Box and verify that the Delicious plugin is listed.  Under the S column (for ‘Sources’ I think) there should be a 1.

6. Make sure that Delicious Bookmarks are selected as a searchable item.

7. If all has gone well, your Delicious bookmarks and tags should show up as search results.

8. You can pivot on tags to narrow the results to just those bookmarks with the given tag.

Delicious plugin for Google Quick Search Box

Update 6-12-2009: The latest version of this plugin for the latest QSB version is here.

—

So, a week or two ago Google released a new project - Quick Search Box.  Seems to be the new Quicksilver.  The early builds seemed nice, if a bit crashy.  I am by no means a Quicksilver power user, but I did use the Delicious plugin for quick access to my bookmarks.

Quick Search Box doesn’t support Delicious (yet), so I thought I could kill a hand-full of birds with one stone:

1. Learn some Objective-C.

2. Finally make some sort of ‘open-source’ contribution.

3. Make something useful for myself.

All of that to say - I’ve written a plugin for Quick Search Box to add Delicious support.  The code is on Github.  I’m still an Xcode newbie and could not figure out how to create a working Xcode project separate from the main QSB distribution, so you are kind of on your own for compiling it at this point.  Or, just grab the prebuilt plugin.

Installation instructions are included in the zip.

A few caveats:

1. At this time QSB doesn’t support ‘accounts’ other than Google accounts, so this plugin currently needs a hackish “put your delicious user info in a separate file and copy it to the right spot” workaround.

2. The code isn’t very robust at this point.  It won’t do well, for example, if Delicious returns unexpected data in a response.

But, it works.  Woohoo.