Imports are a powerful feature in Plucky configurations. This page shows a couple examples of how they might be used.

Example 1: Susan’s books

Susan likes to research books on the Internet. She also uses Plucky. Over time, Susan has added to her Plucky configuration a large number of links to children’s books on Goodreads that she thinks would be useful to other Plucky users who also like children’s books. To do this, she creates a new configuration of type “allowed urls”, and names it “Susan’s approved children’s books”. She then edits the configuration, copying in all the urls she has accumulated over her Plucky history, and saves the configuration. After saving it, she clicks “Share” and “Publish” to share the configuration with all Plucky users.

Peter, another Plucky user, sees Susan’s configuration in the list of public configurations. Peter views the configuration and clicks the import button. When prompted for which configuration to add it to, he selects his one and only configuration. After his delay elapses, Peter then inherits Susan’s list of approved books.

Later, Susan adds more books to her public configuration. These changes automatically propagate to Peter’s computer. If Peter decides he no longer wants to use Susan’s list, he can remove the import rule for “Susan’s approved children’s books”.

Example 2: A Reddit Subreddit blacklist

u/cocucu, a Reddit user, has written a program that crawls Reddit and identifies not-safe-for-work (NSFW) subreddits. He takes the output of his script and creates a new configuration of type “blocked urls”. He then makes public the configuration so that other Plucky users may import it into their configurations.

Example 3: Work/Play configurations

Edmund uses Plucky to keep himself from being distracted from schoolwork during certain hours of the day. But in the evenings, he likes to allow himself more liberal use of the Internet. So:

  1. He creates a new configuration of type “general” and gives it the name “work”.
  2. Edmund then uses the “Imports” tab on his original configuration (on https://u.pluckeye.net/) to import “work” into it. This adds the rule import:70e27698-d8f0-11eb-834d-637d83413d98 to his original configuration.
  3. Edmund then uses the “Raw edit” tab to add a when condition to this rule, changing it to when:9-17 import:70e27698-d8f0-11eb-834d-637d83413d98 (9 representing 9 am and 17 being the 24-hour representation of 5 pm).
  4. Edmund repeats step 1 - 3 to create another new configuration called “play” and import it into his original configuration, except that he uses when:17-22 to import the configuration from 5 pm to 10 pm (making the final rule when:17-22 import:cedf7168-d8f2-11eb-920b-5f362ce9694c).

We (Jon and Garet) recognize that this method of adding and managing scheduled imports is a bit cumbersome. We have thought about possible improvements, and will hopefully implement one in the future.

Last updated: 2022-08-16