All too often people ask me questions that are just as easily looked up on Google. Things like “How do I burn a CD?” or “What does HTML stand for?” Sometimes I use lmgtfy.com (short for letmegooglethatforyou) to show them how easy it could have been to just Goggle it. But it takes too much work to go to the website, do the search, then copy and paste the URL.

Luckily Kim Stebel created a Pidgin plugin to make the process easier and he’s gracious enough to share it. It’s called STFW. I was eager to install it and try it out, but there were no binaries compiled for Windows (yes, I use Windows). So I decided to compile them myself. I’ve never compiled any open source software before so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Luckily, the Pidgin website had plenty of help. All you have to do is follow the tutorial for building Pidgin and then follow the instructions for compiling Windows plugins.

If you want to grab the plugin without compiling it yourself, you can just download it here. After you download it, move it to the “plugins” directory of your Pidgin install, restart Pidgin, then enable it in the “plugins” menu. To use it in conversation, just say /lmgtfy stuff to search for and when you send the message, it will convert it to the necessary link. It’s as easy as that!