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
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."
I haven't RTFA, but the example in the summary sounds pretty much like quick searches anyway.
Oh no... it's the future.
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
Now we can have old style Sierra adventures combined with the joy of Internet graphics...
...
Whee!
Command: GET SUBMIT BUTTON
"Ok! You got it."
Command: USE SUBMIT BUTTON ON POST
"You die."
blast, I was never very good at these games.
MoM++ - A Classic Expanded - [Master of Magic 1.5]
http://mompp.sourceforge.net/
You can see some more of Jon's gadgets here.
SEO Firefox Extension
I just saw this on the page: http://www.yubnub.org/documentation/describe_insta llation/
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Maybe we could expand it to all parts in the Internet. Then people could do cool stuff like check their mail at the prompt, read newsgroups at the prompt, maybe even read each others blogs at the prompt. Hey, we could call it "telnet" or something really catchy. This is just crazy enough to work, guys! Who's with me?
I'm starting my CLI-accessable blog right away. I'm gonna call it the "Finger".
Ain't progress grand?
-Tom
www.*> rm -rf
Experiment!
The best version of this concept that I saw was XMLTerm. It's a graphical CLI, in a web page. It's ideally suited to be a CLI for websites, as well as a website implementing a CLI. It was ahead of its time, and went down the drain when the bubble popped. On purely "zeitgeist" problems - it appears to be technically sound. If there's interest, and effort, in this kind of app now, it will be much better to pick up this orphaned OSS project, than to reinvent it.
--
make install -not war
Is "social" the new overused buzzword of the week?
Now that that's been taken care of, I'd like to say that this is an interesting idea. As a sysadmin I spend a lot of time in a terminal and though this has not been integrated into the terminal yet, the idea of being able to run a web search through a command line interface makes me happy.
I can just imagine:
Now what would be even cooler: You know the console from all the first person shooter games like Quake and Half-Life. Really simple, just hit Tilda and it slides down the top third of the screen. The quake 3 one even has some nifty open GL moving background. Anyway, my point is, how come to get a console in Windows I have to hit WIN+R, "CMD", [Enter]. Not fair. I've searched near and far and havent found any such console for Windows or Linux.
If a fellow slashdotter could point me in the right direction I would greatly apreciate it. I know this is a good idea, and I know I'm not the only one who would love such a program. It would be so nice to simply hit ~, run your ipconfig command, then ~ again and go back to what you were doing.
Aardwolf
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
if you do an ls of available commands, a lot of the commands are advertisements for blogs.
$ php Blahsong.mp3
i never p2p as root
ps, shove the okmmrfj up your ass taco
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.
Yub nub, eee chop yub nub,
toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah.
Yah wah, eee chop yah wah,
toe meet toe pee chee keene, g'noop dock fling oh ah
Coat ee chah tu yub nub,
Coat ee chah tu yah wah,
Coat ee chah tu glo wah.
allay loo ta nuv
Glo wah, eee chop glo wah, ya glo wah pee chu nee foam,
ah toot dee awe goon daa.
Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)
coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)
coat ee cha tu too (ya chaa!)
allay loo tu nuv (3 times)
Glo wah, eee chop glo wah.
Ya glow wah pee chu nee foam,
ah toot dee awe goon daa
allay loo tu nuv.
Lynx, archie, veronica, gopher, ping, traceroute, whois, nslookup... sound familiar to anyone else?
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
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.
Yes, "yub nub" is Ewok for "freedom."
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
I think its worth mentioning that YubNub was created for the RailsDay. A one day Ruby on Rails coding contest which was featured in the developer section of slashdot a week or so ago.
Its not the pinnacle of complexity but its still amazing what you can do in just a day. Hats off the the programmer.
Just bookmark any page that is from a GET query. E.g. an IMDB search for "Batman Begins" gives you this:
b egins
http://www.imdb.com/Find?select=All&for=batman%20
Modify the properties of the bookmark, replacing "batman%20begins" with %s. This is a placeholder.
Give the bookmark a keyword, such as "imdb."
Now you can type "imdb X" in the url bar in firefox, hit enter, and it will do a search for whatever you enter for "X." Much easier than using yubnub.org.
I have bookmark searches setup for all kinds of stuff. Whois, nslookup, tracert, imdb, dictionary, gg (google groups), gi (google image), gm (google maps), yyp (Yahoo Yellow Pages), the list goes on and on. Any URL that accepts query words will work for you.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
they should add a command where you can slashdot a site at will. Let the melting of servers begin!!
<BODY BGCOLOR="#000000" text="#FFFFFF">
<FONT face="sans-serif">C:\><BLINK>_</BLINK></FONT>
</BODY>
</HTML>
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
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
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
[Ding dang dong]
[Psssssssssh]
Player 1: I hate smoke grenades
[Pow!]
Player 2: pwnz0rd!
Player 1 (Spectator): Wallhax!
Elsewhere, Kazaa has developed a command-line version of its file download capabilities:
"GET AmericanIdiot.mp3"
[Duh duh-duh DUH duh-duh duh duh-duh duh duh]
"Don't wanna be an American Idiot..."
I have been using Perl for years to do simple command line scripts to extract information from web sites. From foreign exchange rates, to looking up owners/addresses of incoming phone numbers, or abreviated weather forecasts or train schedules.
I began when my old laptop took too long to start a web browser. But even though I now always have a web browser window open, typing "xchange 1432 EUR" is still much faster and simpler than navigating to the appropriate web site and filling in forms.
I'm actually surprised to see such an idea posted here as news. I thought that anybody who knows some scripting has always been doing this sort of thing.
Of course, Perl is ideal for this sort of thing, with regular expressions and all the CPAN modules (LWP::Simple, and dozens of others more specialized).
Actually, my firefox bookmarks (and relevant keywords) travel with me just fine thanks to bookmarks synchronizer. Of course, now I just have to figure out where that japanese developer's website has gone so I can find new updates to the code if he posts them. Heaven forbid a new ff release break the current stuff. ;-)
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?
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.