Back in the day The Well had a text based conference system, you used dial in, then telnet and later ssh to their server and interacted with other members through a text system called PicoSpan. Eventually things moved to the web and it became a lot more forum like. The thing that I really loved was that in the web version of the forums there was a command line. You could type many of the same commands into the web CLI as you would into the Unix one and have the same effects. Posting, searching, jumping through conferences. It was the web with the CLI power for those who wanted it.
The browser is more and more our interface to all things online and frankly it sux a bit, I want the CLI speed for accessing the Web sites that I like. I’ve created a PHP system I called cmd ages ago that simply routed a command like “guk greenwich” to the Google UK search engine with results restricted to those from the UK. There are of course various online tools that does the same but I found that their ‘book’ keyword would search Amazon US while I wanted UK so I just did one that I can tweak to my liking.
Recently thanks to Googles widely hated changes to their Search UI simply redirecting to Google searches with keywords filled in just was not enough anymore. I want web search back the way it was before they made it suck. So I do what hackers do and wrote a Ruby based pluggable search system. You can see a screenshot of it here showing a Google search.
What you’re seeing here is the oldskool-gcse plugin in action. It uses the Google JSON API to query a Google Custom Search Engine and format the results in a way that does not suck. The Custom Search Engines are quite nice as you can customize all sorts of things in them like which sites to exclude, which to favor, limit results to certain countries or languages allowing you to really customize your search experience. The only down side to the GCSE approach is that Google limits API calls to 100 a day, for me that’s enough for searching but ymmv.
Using this method of searching can have some privacy wins, Google recently announced merging all their online accounts into one and will have all your online activity influence your searches. I wasn’t too worried since by then I had already written Oldskool and will simply use a different Google Account to access their search API than the one I use to read my work mail for example. Simple effective win.
My default search in oldskool is a GCSE that resembles a normal Google search but I can also search for “puppet exec” and oldskool will route that request to a specific GCSE that bumps the official Puppet Labs docs to the top, exclude some annoying things etc. So oldskool is a single entry frontend to many different GCSE backends is quite powerful.
As I said it’s plugable and I’ve written one other plugin that uses my Passmakr gem to generate random passwords. I can just search for pass 10 to get a 10 character password:
Writing your own plugins is very easy and I hope to see ones that queries Redmine instances or other internal databases that you might have using the Oldskool framework to display all the data in one handy place.
It retains the most basic feature of simple keyword base redirects, so I can search for book reamde to get Amazon UK book results instantly.
Config is through a simple YAML file:
--- :google_api_key: your.key :username: http_auth_user :password: http_auth_pass :keywords: - :type: :gcse :cx: you_gcse :keywords: - :default - :type: :gcse :cx: your_gcse :keywords: - puppet - :type: :url :url: http://amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books-uk&field-keywords=%Q% :keywords: - book - books - :type: :password :keywords: pass |
This sets up 2 GCSE searches – one marked as my default search – and the mentioned book search and one that uses the password plugin I’ve shown above.
It needs no writable access to the webserver it runs on and it’s all managed by Bundler and Sinatra – perfect for hosting on the free Heroku tier.
As this is effectively my Web CLI I want it integrated in as many places as possible. I use a lot of desktops – 3 regularly – so the browser is my unified UI to all of this. Your instance will publish OpenSearch meta data which will make it seamlessly integrate into Firefox, Chrome, IE, Gnome DO, Gnome Shell and many many other places.
Here’s Firefox search box the first time you browse to a new instance:
And here is Chrome, you do not even have to add it just start typing the URL to your instance and press tab, the URL bar transforms into a Oldskool search box magically. You can add it permanently and make it default by right clicking on the URL bar and choosing Edit Search Engines….
The code is in my GitHub – Oldskool, Oldskool GCSE and Oldskool Password. I will blog again tomorrow or on another day about creating your own plugins etc.
