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."
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
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/
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
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
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
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.
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.
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