YubNub

When I first started using Firefox a few years ago, I was quite taken with the Smart Keywords feature. After using Linux pretty heavily in college, I started to really appreciate the power of doing things from a command line. Smart Keywords struck me as a way to bring the spirit and power of the command line into the address bar of Firefox. "You mean I can type 'imdb escape from new york' into the address bar, and the IMDB.com page for Escape From New York will magically appear? What a time to be alive."

I don't recall how much time passed before I stumbled across YubNub, but it was like a revelation. "Holy crap! Someone actually drew this web command line thing out to its logical conclusion. Those clever bastards!" Later I discovered that someone had made a Mycroft search plugin for YubNub. So the Firefox search bar could come into the act, and be fully abused as a command line. Friggin' awesome.

Cut to a few weeks ago, and I'm getting really tired of the standard procedure for getting Jeff Atwood's thoughts on whatever's knocking around inside my head at a particular moment. I had checked the Mycroft site several times before, at intervals of a month or so, to see if someone had gone to the effort of creating a plugin for Jeff's search engine yet. After yet another "no dice", I decided to take the matter into my own hands. As I was feeling far too lazy to create a whole Mycroft plugin myself, I turned to YubNub.

After about five minutes of research, I had unleashed my first YubNub command onto the world: coho. Go ahead...try it...I dare you. Drunk with power, I later came back to get my fix in the form of an ASP.NET Forums search: aspnet.

Now that I've contributed two commands to the "web command line", the sky's the limit. I know, I know...I haven't exactly created vi or grep here, but I'm not gonna let you bring me down from this high.

And so...to wrap up here...I rediscovered the awesomeness that is YubNub, and along with many of the other great things in my life, it's all due to my extraordinary laziness.