So I thought it was time I built my own accelerator for IE8 as, well the guys in the IE team have made it so easily surely even I can build one :-)

So I had a think about services I used, and quickly a favourite came to the top, after all who doesn't like going on holiday (that's vacation for my transatlantic colleagues and readers). So when searching around for a holiday I like to use TripAdvisor.com as the user reviews are great.

Now often my workflow goes something like this:

1. Search GenericHolidaySite.com for a location I'm interested in
2. Cope and paste that location into TripAdvisor.com to see the hightest rated hotels.
3. Go back to GenericHolidaySite.com and look at each of the hotel names in the results lists and cross reference them with TripAdvisor.com ratings.
4. After 3 hours I've found a good hotel but wasted too much time :-)

So please step forward Find on TripAdvisor! accelerator. It took me all of 15 minutes to build this thanks to this on MSDN.

For the interested out there here is my finished XML for my accelerator:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<os:openServiceDescription
    xmlns:os="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
  <os:homepageUrl>http://www.tripadvisor.com</os:homepageUrl>
  <os:display>
    <os:name>Find on TripAdvisor!</os:name>
    <os:description>Get the inside scoop on that hotel or resort.</os:description>
    <os:icon>http://www.tripadvisor.com/favicon.ico</os:icon>
  </os:display>
  <os:activity category="Travel">
    <os:activityAction context="selection">      
      <os:execute action="http://www.tripadvisor.com/Search" method="get">
        <os:parameter name="q" value="{selection}" type="text" />
      </os:execute>
    </os:activityAction>
  </os:activity>
</os:openServiceDescription>

and now my workflow is:

1. Search GenericHolidaySite.com for a location I'm interested in

2. Highlight the name of the hotel in the search results, right click and select Find on TripAdvisor!

3. Have a beer and look forward to the holiday!!!

You can get the Accelerator from here. Have fun!