Slashdot Mirror


Command Line for the Web

flood6 writes "SearchEngineWatch offers a look at a new method of interacting with the Internet, YubNub. This 'social command line for the web' lets users create commands that interact with websites. Currently, most of the commands apply to search, but new commands could work with any site that accepts variables passed with HTML's GET command. For example, iap moon would search the Internet Archive for all media related to 'moon'."

9 of 243 comments (clear)

  1. Web apps and the command line by glinden · · Score: 4, Informative

    John Gruber wrote a great essay on this called "The Location Field is the New Command Line". As he put it, "Web apps are just so damned easy to use ... It's all about the fact that you just type the URL and there's your email."

  2. More... by flood6 · · Score: 3, Informative
    I didn't realize it when I submitted the story, but yubnub was created by Jon Aquino who recently appeared in /. for his K'nexis Keyboard. Also yubnub is developed in the /. darling Ruby on Rails and was Jon's entry into the 2004 Rails Day.

    You can see some more of Jon's gadgets here.

  3. Speaking of Which by MankyD · · Score: 3, Informative
    --
    -dave
    http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
  4. Do this in your own browser instead... by Otto · · Score: 3, Informative

    The only advantage of this is that it's collaborative... and as other users have pointed out, quite a lot of the commands on the site are crap and need moderation of some sort.

    But your browser has this built in already.

    -If you use IE, you can set up these type of search shortcuts using TweakUI.
    -If you use Firefox/Mozilla, you can create bookmarks that implement these sort of shortcuts. There's some examples in your bookmarks menu when you first install Firefox, just look at those for how to do it.

    In both cases, after creating them, you can just type "shortcut search terms" in the address to make it do that "search". Doesn't have to be a search of course, it can be any kind of HTTP GET that you want. I have several defined..
    -g for quick googling
    -imdb for movie lookups
    -imdbq for movie quote lookups
    -snpp to search the simpsons archives..
    -And so on. ;)

    --
    - Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
  5. Re:toolbar by thermostat42 · · Score: 3, Informative

    you mean like Konqueror's web shortcuts?

    --
    no comment
  6. easier with firefox | opera by ^Z · · Score: 5, Informative

    In FF, you can have bookmarks like this: http://livejournal.com/~%25s/ Give it a keyword (say, 'lj'), type in the URL line: lj someusername and someusername's livejournal opens. This is the simplest example. I have several more sophisticated; this mostly obviates the FF search box. And all this with a *very* simple syntax that only allows substitution of one string. Imagine something a bit more powerful in that place.

    --

    Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes

  7. Konqueror has this by infolib · · Score: 3, Informative
    With support for Google, Wikipedia, Leo german dictionary, CPAN and many others. Just type wiki: whatever in the address bar to search Wikipedia for "whatever". I went from knowing jack about these "web shortcuts" to creating my own in five minutes. (Just copy and modify existing ones)

    Oh, and you can also use the address bar to ssh for your files (fish:) or get the images of your camera (digikam:). Bow to the power of the KIOslave framework!

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
  8. Konqueror has done this for years by Urban+Garlic · · Score: 4, Informative

    The K desktop environment has things called "KIOslaves" which recognize certain pseudo-protocols on the Konqueror location bar (and other places).

    Internet examples include "deb:" for Debian package searches, "rf:" for rpmfind, "gg:" for Google, "ggl:" for Google-I-feel-lucky, and "rfc:" for getting RFC text from the IETF website, and "wp:" for Wikipedia. There are lots of these.

    Non-internet examples include "man:" for viewing man pages, and "info:" for viewing those otherwise horrible GNU info pages.

    --
    2*3*3*3*3*11*251
  9. Re:Seems kinda fadish, but I'll bite by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 3, Informative

    how come to get a console in Windows I have to hit WIN+R, "CMD", [Enter].

    Well, you could always set up a keyboard shortcut that launched CMD.EXE -- I've got mine mapped to CTRL-ALT-S. I also keep shortcut icons to my Windows and Cygwin shells in the Quick Launch dock, for more easy access.

    The more important aspect of your feature request, though, is to make the shell itself dockable: the command line stays out of the way, you call it up only for as long as you need it, and then it hides itself again. I'd like to see someone implement such a feature, too.