Getting Started

What Chromie Homie does

Chromie Homie by URLflows is for people who publish extensions on the Chrome Web Store. The Developer Dashboard keeps each extension's pages, numbers and listing text a few clicks apart, one extension at a time; Chromie Homie puts them side by side.

The toolbar panel

Click the toolbar icon for every extension you publish, each with its users, rating and a small chart of its installs, and a link to each of its Developer Dashboard pages: Package, Store listing, Privacy, Distribution, Installs, Impressions, Users, Ratings and Support. The same panel opens in Chrome's side panel or a window of its own. See Use the toolbar panel.

The settings pages

  • Extensions: paste your dashboard page and every extension comes in, or add them by ID or address.
  • Analytics: drop in the CSV files the dashboard exports and compare every extension on one chart, or see each one's own trend.
  • Scorecard: every extension's numbers over one window, with the largest changes named.
  • Listings: what every listing says, side by side, with a score out of 100 and the gaps marked.
  • Capabilities: tags for what each extension does, and which pairs overlap.
  • Promotion and Timeline: where you've promoted each extension, tagged store links, and the releases and promotions that show on your charts.
  • Feedback: an inbox of reviews and support questions, ideas, and a loop checklist.
  • Data health: what's out of date, what was never imported, and where to refresh it.

Why you copy pages in

Chrome doesn't let extensions read or script Chrome Web Store pages, and the Chrome Web Store API carries no analytics, ratings or reviews. So Chromie Homie works from what you can copy: a page's source, a page saved as .html, a store page's text, or the CSV files the dashboard exports. That also means it needs no access to any website, and nothing leaves your browser.

A routine to keep it current

Getting Started shows the loop: set up once, then go round Bring in, Check, Act and Record every week and after each release. Four workflows (Set up, Keep it current, Ship a version and Grow) list the steps, each linked to the page that does it.

Related guides

Next, read Install Chromie Homie, Add your extensions or Keep your data fresh with Data health.