Blok blogs

Next to searching from the Lenzcape application, you can also use the search plugin to search directly from the browser’s searchbar. This is how I am using Lenzcape myself usually.

The searchbar is particularly easy when you know the area that you want to search (that’s the lenz in lenzcape’s terminology). Further, the more you need to search in a specific area, the more it will pay off to create a lenz for that area.

Lenzcape’s searchbar in Firefox

To illustrate what I mean, let’s take grails as an example. I used grails to develop Lenzcape, so I am often searching grails related stuff. The base lenz for grails is “dev/grails” and following the search syntax you separate the lenz part of the query and the terms that you want to search for with a “)”. In this way you can type dev/grails ) redirect in the searchbar and it will search for redirect just in the grails area.

But you can also search more specific grails topics such as:

• grails issues: dev/grails/issue ) redirect
• grails reference documentation: dev/grails/doc ) redirect or if you want to search a particular version dev/grails/doc/1.0 ) redirect or dev/grails/doc/1.1 ) redirect
• grails api: dev/grails/api ) redirect, dev/grails/api/1.0 ) redirect or dev/grails/api/1.1 ) redirect
• grails on git: dev/grails/git ) redirect

These lenzes all work for you as well because they are predefined. But you can also extend lenzes by integrating them with your own bookmarks. For example, I have included a few grails blogs with tag dev/grails/blog to my personal bookmarks. In this way I can search my bookmarked grails blogs via dev/grails/blog ) redirect. Note that if you type this using the search bar you will get no results unless you have also added bookmarks with tag “dev/grails/blog”.