A command line for the web
To the slow grasping moron like me, it meant nothing when I first heard about Yubnub by Jonathan Acquino. Jon created it for the 2005 Rails Day, a 24 hour programming contest, as he explains on his blog. That was like 2 weeks ago. Recently some guy named Aaron released a Firefox search plugin for it. Now, I feel like the rocking time I have with Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts. Don’t get me? Let me explain.
With Yubnub, you can virtually query anything on the web from just one command line. For example, I want to search my site for backlinks on Technorati. Two ways to do it (three actually). First one: Go to Technorati site. Enter your site name in the search box, press enter. Second one (I was using this until now): Use the bookmarklet from Technorati. The third (and the best) one: type tec site name and enter. Here tec is a shortcut word for Technorati. Amazing? Wait there’s more.
- g — Google search [example: g wordpress ]
- am — Amazon search [ example: am harry potter ]
- a — Answers.com (dictionary) search [ example: a scalpel ]
- gnews — Google News search [ example: gnews london bombings ]
- flk — Flickr [ example: flk sunshine ]
- wp — Wikipedia [ example: wp jk rowling ]
- imdb — Internet Movie Database [ example: imdb batman ]
- deli — del.icio.us tags [ example: deli open source ]
- y — Yahoo search [ example: y .. oh you should get it by now ]
And 50 other most popular commands that you can imagine. Don’t find a command of your liking? Create one!
Yubnub is as radical and as geeky as it can get. Can you believe it’s called a social command line for the web? Yeah right, some rocking, super-cool social command line! And, I am completely hooked.
Update [21 July]: Nivi has a great post on Yubnub called RSS is the TCP/IP of Web 2.0 [via Read/Write Web].
Great find! Now the question is: how do I embed that command-line in my portal? Maybe I’ll figure something out.
Jul 20, 05 at 10:34Roy: That’s dead easy. Replace form action elements with variables defined for your blog search and Yubnub search separately (if you want to keep both blog search and Yubnub search) and use a radio option to feed action to your input.
Jul 20, 05 at 12:13Hi Chetan - Rock on! Also there’s a great YubNub command called gmails that you can use to search your Gmail. I use it all the time.
Jul 21, 05 at 14:44Hi Jonathan, thanks so much for making my life a little easier. You seriously rock, dude!
Jul 21, 05 at 15:06Chetan, for an extra productivity boost - put a YN command line on your blog/site or roll your own. I chose the latter and have never been more productive.
Aug 19, 05 at 13:59Kunal: Nice command line.
As for me, Firefox Yubnub search plugin does the job just fine without having to load my blog every time I need to lookup something.
Aug 19, 05 at 21:11