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SitePoint recently launched a bunch of cool stuff for would-be IE8 users, utilising the new Web Slices and Accelerators to create a nice cool way for those users to access SitePoint pages and specifically the cool SitePoint HTML & CSS Reference site.

I’m going to show what I do in Opera that is kinda similar to the Reference Accelerator. Ok, it ain’t as fancy as the IE stuff, but it works almost the same.

Custom Search in Opera

Firstly, for in-page search, I use a custom search engine. Custom search engines are an amazing feature once you get to know how to add them, and you’ll even find creative and awesome uses for them too. So to add a ‘custom search engine’ in Opera, you can start by going to the relevant website, and right-clicking on the search bar… in the pop-up menu, right at the bottom you’ll see ‘create search’ – a click on that and you’re already on your way:

When you click on the create search function, you’ll be asked to enter a keyword, which can be used from the address bar- for example, typing ‘g sitepoint’ into the Opera address bar searches Google for ‘SitePoint’. Except in this case, we could use ’spr border’ to search the SitePoint Reference for the border property.

Opera Panels

The final sweet thing is adding the SitePoint Reference as a panel in Opera. Hit shift+F12, or open the tools menu and click on ‘appearance’, then look at the Panels menu: [ Note, that you should be on the page you want to add the panel for, just to make it even easier. ] Click on add panel, and you’ll save the page you are on as a bookmark. Opera then adds that bookmark as a web panel.

At the end of all that, you can click on the panel from the Panel Menu [F4 toggles the Panels menu]. Just remember then to check the box under the ‘View’ Menu, which allows you to set the panel to appear as ‘Small Screen’.

As you can see from this clipped screenshot, the reference shows up just like it would on a mobile device, so theoretically has all the same functions. Search is near the top, but scroll down and you’ll find the links to the three sections of the SitePoint reference.

In-page custom search

Did you know you could search using your custom search engines in-page with Opera? Just like this:

And that’s all there is too it. Mighty-useful if you want a quick way to grab info’ from the SitePoint reference in Opera. Hell, you could even set the reference as your default search engine if you wanted too..