Installing Sifter

WARNING: We strongly recommend you to create a new Firefox profile for experimenting with Sifter. Sifter is built on top of Piggy Bank, which calls Java code inside Firefox. This unfortunately affects the stability of Firefox as its Java support is flakey.

You can install Sifter by clicking on this link

 http://people.csail.mit.edu/dfhuynh/research/downloads/sifter.xpi (5 Mb)

Remember that Firefox will not let you install extensions from newly encountered domains. So, note the light yellow bar right on top of the web page, find the Edit Options button to the right, and tell Firefox to allow installation from the http://people.csail.mit.edu/ domain. Then you must click the link again. (I know, this security feature of Firefox is lame.) Like installing any extension, you need to restart Firefox after you install Sifter.

Sifter seems to perform best on Amazon.com. Go there and search for "john grisham" and then expand the sidebar on the right (next to the window's scrollbar).

Building Sifter

In order to build Sifter, you need to check out both Longwell and Piggy-Bank. In fact, Sifter was built right on top of Piggy-Bank and checked into the same project. Use your Subversion to check out the following projects into sibling directories called longwell2 and piggy-bank respectively:

• http://simile.mit.edu/repository/longwell/tags/2.1-sesame2-fresnel-uist/

• http://simile.mit.edu/repository/piggy-bank/branches/dfhuynh/trunk/

Use ant to build Longwell--in the longwell2 directory, run

 ant build

Then in the piggy-bank directory, run

 ant dist

That should generate an xpi file in the same directory.

We strongly recommend you to create a new Firefox profile for experimenting with Sifter. Sifter seems to perform best on Amazon.com. Go there and search for "john grisham" and then expand the sidebar on the right (next to the window's scrollbar).

For more information on Piggy Bank, refer to

• its project page
• its wiki page