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'."
I like the concept, however the premise is the flaw. What I mean by this is that the social concept of letting people add their own commands is the biggest draw, but the biggest flaw. Doing a quick ls on the site reveals such choice commands on the first page:
p Created 2005-06-20 16:21 - Description - Nominate - www.pogo.com --does nothing
tiki Created 2005-06-20 15:10 - Description - Nominate - http://www.tehanitrading.com/ --takes you to somone's website only
And then of course you have the sophisticated ones:
fuckthefucker Created 2005-06-20 12:55 - Description - Nominate - http - does nothing
And if you try to create a legitimate command and something like "p" is already taken you are out of luck. This is why you will need someone to moderate it from time to time (this is sort of on the to do list by flagging spam commands, but it looks like they also have a potential problem with bot submissions as well). But, once you do this then you get the problem of my command is better than your command. It would be nice to see an individual implementation whereby you could store your own commands and could "share" them with others.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
This would seem to have more worth if it was done with a plugin/toolbar. Right now, it requires that I switch to my address bar, type in yubnub.org, wait for it to load, switch to the form input, and type in my command.
Much better if one could skip straight to the command part.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
I know, bad geek humor, but it does kinda seem like a throwback to gopher.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Is "social" the new overused buzzword of the week?
Lynx, archie, veronica, gopher, ping, traceroute, whois, nslookup... sound familiar to anyone else?
>use LAMP
That does nothing. It appears you have IIS.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Not every argument requires reduction to absurdity.
Yes, there have been apps that have done this forever. But they've all been standalone, and don't travel with you between machines. I wrote a post about interfacting with YubNub via Monad here: http://www.leeholmes.com/blog/MSHAndYubNubACommuni tyCommandline.aspx
It all goes downhill from first post
I had a look at the site. What is it that is new and/or interesting in this? I went to the "golden eggs" page, which is supposed to list the most interesting commands. What I see there falls into one of 2 categories:
- a complicated way of executing a normal shell command (di ("Domain (WHOIS) Information using coolwhois.com") seems to do exactly the same as a modern whois, ipinfo-url looks like a a lame version of host, etc.),
or
- it does the same as adding a search engine to your Firefox search bar.
Have I missed something?
cause otherwise you couldn't do everything?
Confusing HTTP and HTML is like confusing Samba and Microsoft Word, Kazaa and MP3, or BitTorrent and ISOs. Granted, they're slightly related, in that URL syntax is used by both, and HTML includes mechanisms for fairly directly affecting forms-POSTing and file-uploading, but other than that small overlap, they're clearly quite different.