- Download the plug-in and let Expander expand it.
- Take the resulting macosxhints.src file and drag it into the Internet folder withing the Internet Search Sites folder, which is inside your user's Library folder.
- Launch Sherlock and select the Internet channel and then unselect all plug-ins other than the one for macosxhints.
- Due to limitations in the current search engine, you can only search for phrases; "foo bar" runs a search for the phrase "foo bar", not occurences of either "foo" or "bar". So limit your searches to one or two words ("Classic" instead of "OS 9 Classic compatibility").
- The results list will list all hints (not comments) which contain your search phrase; double-click any result to load the actual web page.
I have plans to make one for the forum site as well, but the search engine there is a bit more troublesome (it goes through an intermediate step which I can't quite decode yet).
I read Apple's technote 1141, Extending and Controlling Sherlock to learn the Sherlock plug-in syntax, and then just started experimenting. This is what I came up with:
<SEARCHThe resultListEnd item has been broken onto two lines for easier readability. The only trick in creating the plug-in is that the file type must be 'issp', which I did with SetFileInfo in the Terminal. TextEdit has no problem opening or editing these file types.
name = "macosxhints.com"
method = "get"
action = "http://www.macosxhints.com/search.php"
description = "Search published hints on macosxhints.com">
<INPUT
name = "query"
user>
<INPUT
name = "datestart"
value = >
<INPUT
name = "dateend"
value = >
<INPUT
name = "topic"
value = "0">
<INPUT
name = "type"
value = "stories">
<INPUT
name = "author"
value=>
<INPUT
name = "mode"
value = "search">
<INTERPRET
resultListStart = "Hits</th><tr align=center>"
resultListEnd = "</td></tr></table></td><
/tr></table></td></tr></table>"
resultItemStart = "<td align=left>"
resultItemEnd = "<tr align=center>">
</SEARCH>
I'm certain this script can be improved; if you have Sherlock plug-in experience, feel free to let me know what can be done better!

