Personalizing search engines and web styles

[riwebb]

Hello,

I have written a number of .plist files for searching different sites. As time passes, websites change how you access them (note to Leister management--the My Heritage Library Edition I submitted will no longer work--they have changed the URL necessary and it now must be customized to your personal library so there is no one-size-fits-all solution available), and I need to update them. Is there an updated set of instructions for how to write search .plist files from this one: http://www.leisterpro.com/download/C...Reunion10.pdf? [edit: I must have had an error somewhere--by copying most of my original code from the "official" version of my search site and then changing the URL and removing one field that has been deprecated, my search engine is now working.]

I have a second technical issue that is a little more involved I fear. I created my own style with slight modification to the Brown Leather style (I just changed a few colors and modified the mouse-over behavior--you can view my style here: http://webbgenealogy.com/). The problem is, I discovered that if I leave the name as Brown Leather, it will be overwritten with updates. I used to have it as its own style and I could select it just fine, but now I cannot select my personal style. Is there a tutorial on how to create a personal style and have it show up in the list of available styles for making web cards?

Thank you,

Richard

[Mark]

Hi Richard,

(note to Leister management--the My Heritage Library Edition I submitted will no longer work...

Thanks for the heads up. We've removed this search engine on our end of things, so it won't be distributed with future versions of Reunion, but it will remain for those who already have it as the updating process for search engines doesn't remove anything (so that users can create custom searches without risking them being deleted). Anyone who wants to remove this search will need to go to:

~/Library/Application Support/Reunion/Search Engines/

And delete the "MyHertiageLibraryEdition.com.plist" file. An easy way to access this folder, for anyone who doesn't know how to get there, is to open a Finder window and select:

Go -> Go to Folder...

From the main menu-bar at the top of the computer screen, then enter the full file path shown above (including the "~" at the beginning), and click "Go".

Unfortunately, I am missing one step--there is some command I have to run to rebuild the list of search engines from the .plist files in ~/Library/Application Support/Reunion/Search Engines but I cannot find reference to what that step is anymore.

Quitting out of Reunion and re-opening it should update the search engines in the program based on the items in this folder. Let me know if not.

Is there a tutorial on how to create a personal style and have it show up in the list of available styles for making web cards?

Duplicate the folder containing the style that you want to base your own style off of, then change the name of the folder to something appropriate and, finally, change the "title" line in the details.txt file found in the style's folder to your new styles name.

HTH

[riwebb]

Thank you Mark! It turned out that I had an "&" where I should have had a "&amp;" in my .plist. I have that fixed now and my search is working. There is still a trifling problem I am having with this (and only this) .plist--the space used in the URL is %2F3. Unforunately, when I put <key>spc</key> <string>%2F3</string> into my .plist, this gets inserted into the URL as %252F3 (that is, Reunion is replacing "%" with "%25" when parsing the .plist to create the URL). MyHeritage is smart enough to consider the resulting %252F3 as a separator in the search although the search criteria shows the ugly characters. Is there any way to correct this behavior?

And thank you so much for the information about the web styles. I will get that fixed up and avoid frustration in the future!

Richard

[Mark]

Is there any way to correct this behavior?

Send me a copy of the plist file (help@leisterpro.com), if you don't mind, and I'll take a closer look at it. I'm sure there's a way to work around the issue (a solution isn't popping into my head at the moment), but it'll help to have the plist to test with.

Thanks,

[RWells]

I also have a question. Is there an updated information on how to write your own plist?

[Mark]

The only documentation outlining that is found here. While that is from 2012, it's still relevant - you should be able to create PLIST files using that document. We have added a few tags since, but they were added to address changes to specific search engines (like an FM_LN tag, which outputs FirstName_LastName for the Ancestry.com search).

Aside from those search engine specific changes, the general method of building a PLIST has not changed.