Want to index your Trillian IM logs?

Jeff Schoolcraft wrote in his blog about a problem he had getting WDS to index his Trillian log files, which are text files with a “.log“ extension – an extension we ignore by default.  Removing that extension from the ignore list will get the files indexed (assuming you choose to index the appropriate folder), but it then displays some bizarre behavior when returning results.

As a fellow Trillian user I sympathized with Jeff’s problem, although I hadn’t yet tried to index those logs.  Upon discovering this problem, I decided to look into a way to make it work in our current release.

My first thought was… why doesn’t Trillian use XML like Messenger does?  Well actually, it turns out that Trillian 3.x also writes an “XML” file for each log in addition to the .log – but unfortunately, it isn’t valid XML and it doesn’t include an XSLT. Otherwise, we could display it just like we do MSN Messenger logs.

Ideally, it would be great if Trillian could fix that, and then we’d have results comparable to Messenger.  It’s probably even something that can be done with a Trillian plug-in.  But in the meantime, I found another solution for the *.log problem:

This temporary workaround requires that you edit the registry.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO EDIT THE REGISTRY IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING.

1) Open regedit as an Administrator.
2) Navigate to the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.log key
3) Right-click on the key and select “New String Value”
4) Name the string “Content Type” and set it to “text/plain”

Now .log files will work just like .txt files, allowing you to search your Trillian logs.