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New!

Google gadget version coming! This application will soon be available as a Google gadget which you can add to your iGoogle home page, giving you the best of both worlds. Hurray!

Try it first!

Just follow this url http://goldenv.googlepages.com/tphp.html and try out the tool. Read the into below for more info.

Introduction

Imagine you could have a browser home page, which is loaded faster than even the Google home page, provides recommendations based on your past searches, and provides powerful "switches" to route to the the world of internet with you in the back seat ?

If that appeals to you, this is a project designed for users like you. Give it a try and you will not be disappointed, but will simply be instead asking for more out of it.

A "command based way to start your web journey" is another way to think about this project.

Get it! (No installation needed)

Just download the application html file and save it to a convenient location (in a temp folder or on the desktop if you just want to try this out). That's it!

Use it

Open your browser preferences and set this page as your home page. On a Macintosh, for example my file name is file:///Users/goldenv/Developer/projects/tphp.html which I set in Firefox's home page field (Firefox -> Preferences)

Internet Explorer users: You must tell IE to run local scripts, which is necessary to run tphp, since it is implemented in javascript. And note that javascript does not have any local file system access. So this permission is safe. Your privacy or security is not lost. To enable this feature, just follow these steps (screenshot):

In Tools -> Internet Options - Advanced Tab
Scroll down to the Security options (one with the yellow lock)
Enable _"Allow active content to run in files on My Computer"_ option
Disable this option if you choose to not use tphp

Usage

You can also just open it in the browser without setting it as a home page to first try it out. If you do not like the project, simply discard the html file! How cool is that ?

Once tphp.html is opened in a browser, try such queries and bingo! you are on the move.

visit california
-g vishal shah
-y vishal shah

So, if you just type in a search term in "the box" it will run you to a google search. If you type in a query followed by >> as in california>> it will directly take you to google's first/top result using I'm feeling lucky.

And if you type in a URL, it will route you to that URL. These are the basics. No switches needed. But that's just the beginning and the fun part is yet to be demonstrated.

Advanced queries have a switch as in "-wp" for searching wikipedia followed by the search query. And this concept can be expanded to things such as facebook profiles, ebay searches and more powerful custom searches (Complete TPHP command reference)

-wp pi
-g,y san francisco
wii games>>
-dict cosmos
-maps sfo
-maps 5300 Iron Horse Pkwy, Dublin, CA
-technorati semantic web
-trace hulu.com
-ping google.com
-amazon,bestbuy,ccity call of duty 4

Note: The help includes a link to the home page of the service, ex. google.com for -g or google maps for -maps. You should fall in love by now. But that is just scratching the surface, here are some more queries,

-dnsbl 68.127.151.155
-games burnout paradise
-amazon wii games
-gi wii
-/. microsoft
-ebay wii
-math aristotle wheel paradox 
-wp meaning of life
-recipe sugar cookies
-country zimbabwe
-dial san francisco
-whois dynamicphilosophy.com
-ping dynamicphilosophy.com
-lookup dynamicphilosophy.com
-reversedns 64.233.187.99

This project is also intended to be extensible. A web page (pythons script) is in the works, that takes this html page as input and allows one to enter additional search engines and queries on the fly. The script will spit out the generated html file and all you have to do is replace it with the one on your computer.

Complete Command Reference

Complete TPHP command reference

General Concept

The general concept behind this project was to provide a simple command based interface to the web. Since there are multiple resources on the web, what if you can give a shortcut (aka switch) to many of them so that one can conveniently access them ? And this project was born to solve that problem.

Roadmap

Soon, I will release a web based script to add/update your favorite sites and commands. So just stay tuned.

Privacy/Security

No data is ever transmitted from your system. There is a local "cookie" stored on your computer which is used by the recommendations feature. But it is local to your system and since tphp runs on your system only, it is never transmitted to anywhere on the internet or even other computers in your network.

In other words, tphp is an extremely safe, secure and privacy-compliant application. The only complaint you might have is for Internet Explorer which requires enabling the "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer" option.

Uninstall/Remove

Just remove the tphp.html file downloaded. Clear your browser cookies to remove stored recommendations. That's it.

If you used Internet Explorer you might want to disable back the "Allow active content to run in files on My Computer" option. Refer to the "Activate" section above on this page to locate the option.

Thanks for using TPHP!

Contact

goldenv -at= gmail.com