Awesome

What?

A simple pluggable system to create a single point of entry into systems like Google and other utility services found over the web

It lets you create search keywords like:

 book neil stephenson
 map E14
 guk guardian

These searches might search the Amazon book section, use Google maps and search the UK edition of Google specifically. Essentially this creates a CLI for the web.

You can use (or create) plugins to extend the behavior, plugins exist to integrate with Google Custom Search Engines and also my Passmakr gem for password generation.

There of course existing systems like this and you can even find comparable features in many browsers. I've found that I do not always agree with the keywords used in some of the public services and could not override them. These services also rely on a service matching your needs existing somewhere else. With Oldskool you can host services inside the Oldshool process using a simple plugin interface, like ones supporting specific Google Custom Search Engines or generating passwords using a gem.

It's completely static and should deploy easily to Heroku on their free tier.

We'll soon create a Mycroft plugin so that you can easily install it as a search engine into Chrome, Firefox or IE.

Deploying?

This is a Sinatra application and can be deployed just like any other Sinatra application, it's designed to be used with Bundler to install the various Gems.

It should also just deploy to Heroku using the files and config below but just pushed to Heroku instead of your own servers.

Basically you need to create an Apache vhost with Passenger and copy the following files from the oldskool gem, you can find these files in this GitHub repository or in the Gem.

Copy the Gemfile, GemFile.lock and config.ru files into your vhost, you should also create a config directory and create a file oldskool.yaml in it, see an example below:

---
:google_api_key: YOUR_API_KEY
:username: you
:password: secret
:keywords:
- :type: :gcse
  :cx: YOUR_SEARCH_ENGINE
  :keywords:
  - g
  - :default
- :type: :url
  :url: http://amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/index=books-uk&field-keywords=%Q%
  :keywords:
  - book
  - books
- :type: :url
  :url: http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=%Q%
  :keywords:
  - map
  - gmuk
  - gmap
- :type: :password
  :keywords: pass

The above sets up 7 keywords:

• A Google Custom Search Engine with the keyword g, this is the default keyword when none is specified
• A book specific search at Amazon UK with the keywords book and books
• A Google Map search with the keywords map, gmuk and gmap
• A Password generator with the password pass

This setup use 2 plugins - the GCSE and Password plugins.

If you include the :username and :password lines Basic HTTP Auth will be enabled for your site

To activate these just put the following in your Gemfile

source 'http://rubygems.org'

gem 'sinatra'
gem 'oldskool'
gem 'oldskool-password'
gem 'oldskool-gcse'

and run:

$ bundle install --deployment

This will fetch all the needed gems and install it locally to your vhost, you should be able to just run it under Passenger now else you can easily test it using rackup

$ bundle exec rackup -o 0 -p 4567

This will start up a webserver on port 4567 on your machine that you can browse to

Installing Plugins?

There are some plugins already - see the oldskool-gcse and oldskool-password ones in my GitHub account - to install those simply add them to the Gemfile of your site as in the example above and update the bundle.

To tie the new plugins to keywords you should edit the config file of your site, what to add to it depends on the specific plugin - see the individual plugin documentation for details.

Contact?

R.I.Pienaar / rip@devco.net / @ripienaar / http://devco.net/