queriac blog

This tumblelog is about Queriac, an online tool that allows you to manage your quicksearches, shortcuts, and bookmarklets by taking them out of your browser profile and onto the web, making them portable, taggable, shareable, and generally easier to manage. Drawing from the concept of YubNub and extending it in the spirit of del.icio.us, Queriac effectively turns your browser’s address bar into a flexible command line. To start using Queriac, head over to http://queri.ac.
Aug 29
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Sharing Your Commands

In case you haven’t noticed, there were some major changes released in the past months related to how we share commands. Back in the day when you saw a command you liked, you simply copied it and presto, you had your own unique copy. The problem with this was that as our command repository grew, it became cluttered with so many duplicate commands. Searching for new commands became a pain. But most important of all, there was no intelligent way of telling users about improvements in commands, commands that are broken, etc. So what we did to address this was create a master command (ie master google command) and let users create their own user command from it (ie your google user command).

Some basics about these entities:

  1. A command is controlled by its creator and/or an admin. It will have the latest working functionality and isn’t tied to any user (ie if a user disappears the command will stay)

    1. If you’ve created a command don’t worry about looking for a separate form to edit it. Updates to your user command are passed automatically to the command as well.
    2. Eventually commands will be more group-oriented so that any command user can suggest updates to a command and if considered an authority on the command update the command themself.

  2. A user command is your custom version of a command. You customize most aspects of your user command, what default options you want, name, description, etc. except for the public state of it and the url.

    1. The reason for the fixed url is that we don’t want user commands to be related to a command but have completely different functionality. As limiting as this may sound, another feature of commands (to be explained in the next post) opens up a whole world of custom functionality for your user commands. Of course you can always just create a new command based on your user command.

    2. When you copy (really subscribe to) a command or user command, you’re creating a user command of that command.

  3. Private commands don’t have any the benefits of being part of a command group. You’re on your own. In general we encourage users to be public in order to share what we know and learn about commands. If you’d like more privacy features, feel free to make a ticket and/or pipe up on the list.

  4. When a command is updated no updates are pushed out to user commands. Rather, your user command’s status is changed on its own page. Clicking on the provided update link will update your command to the latest.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend browsing commands and sorting them to your liking. You can search the commands with the form on that page or with the searchc command.