YubNub is a social command line for the web and the brainchild of Jon Aquino. It basically allows you to use quick and simple commands for tasks that ought to be quick and simple to do, but sometimes aren’t. This post will explain the various methods of integrating YubNub directly into your Firefox Internet browser.
Why YubNub?
The underlying idea with YubNub is similar to search bars and Firefox’s quick searches: you want to, say, do a Google search without actually having to waste your time loading Google’s front page. In YubNub, you can achieve this by typing in g theoretical linguistics, and voilà, you are taken to Google’s search page for theoretical linguistics. The system does more complicated things, as well: xe -amount 100 -from USD -to EUR will tell you, by forwarding you to xe.com, how much 100 US dollars is in Euros. This way, you can save a few precious seconds for every search that you make.
A few seconds may not sound like much, but if you make just fifty searches a day, which is a very rough estimate of what I am doing, it starts to count. After all, with an average two seconds saved per search, you will save some 100 seconds every day, which in a year makes a grand total of 36,500 seconds, or slightly over 10 hours. If you live up to 80, which is the current life expectancy in the developed world (give or take a few years), and you start using web searches actively at the age of 15, YubNub will save 650 hours, or almost a month, of your life. You can then basically say that using YubNub makes you live longer!
As I mentioned earlier, YubNub is similar to the search bars and quick search functions in Firefox. However, I personally find search bars clumsy to use, and keeping my two computers up-to-date with quick search keywords is a pain in the neck. In YubNub, it is the community that creates the keywords, and so there is no issue of keeping two computers up-to-date, or having to recreate keywords after re-installing the operating system. They are always there.
Of course, these fountain-of-youth-like advantages that YubNub provides will not be there if you actually have to go to YubNub’s website to do the searches. It indeed defeats the whole purpose, I would say. Therefore, what you need is a way to access the Yubnub searches from your browser, which in my case is mainly Firefox. There are a few ways to achieve this, and for the purposes of spreading information they are listed below in the order of my personal preference, from the least preferred solution to the most preferred one.
Not a good solution: Add to your search bar
You can add YubNub to your search bar, if you use one (I don’t, hence this is the least preferred method for me). For more information, see YubNub’s blog. I don’t personally use search bars because they are too clumsy to get to, and although you may save a second of your time with them, you certainly won’t save two! Moreover, having both YubNub and for instance Amazon searches added is kind of counter intuitive, as YubNub already includes an Amazon search. In fact, the brilliance of YubNub is that you can do away with search bars altogether.
A possible solution: Extensions
Perhaps the easiest way to properly add YubNub to your Firefox is simply to get a Firefox extension that does it for you. There are a few of these, but RubNub appears to be the most popular one. That said, just a week ago I found and tested an extension that I personally thought was much better, however I ended up uninstalling it because it still wasn’t my preferred method, and now for the life of me I cannot find the extension anymore. So, there is a better solution than RubNub out there, but I don’t know where it is. Anyway, the point is that here YubNub will be added to your address bar, not your search bar, saving you precious screen estate. However, you don’t really need an extension to do just that for you, and hence it is not an optimal solution. This is why you don’t see RubNub in the list of Firefox extensions that I use.
A potential solution: Quick search
Why install an extension when you can simply make YubNub a quicksearch? Go to Bookmarks > Quick Searches, right click, and select “New bookmark”. Use http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=%s as the location, and give it a keyword like for instance “yub”. Now, every time you want to do a YubNub search, you simply go to your address bar and type “yub” followed by the YubNub command: yub wp theoretical linguistics would for example serve you the Wikipedia page for “theoretical linguistics”. Yet, it takes at least a tenth of a second to type “yub”, so I don’t like this solution, either.
My current preferred solution: Default search
Have you noticed that if you type something to your Firefox address bar which is not a URL, you will be taken directly to a website covering that topic? What happens there is that on default Firefox does a Google “I feel lucky” search if the input does not look like a proper web address. Why the Firefox developers have decided to use the “I feel lucky” feature and not simply do a proper Google search is definitely beyond me, but the existence of this feature allows for easier YubNub integration. This is because you can without too much effort change the deafult search to point to YubNub and not Google.
All you need to do is open a new tab and type about:config in the address bar. This will give you a list of configuration options for the browser. Now, scroll down to “keyword.URL” and what you should see is the string for Google’s search. Right click it, select “modify”, and enter http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command= as the new value. From now on, YubNub can be directly used from your address bar. For example, amazon introduction to theoretical linguistics will take you to Amazon.com’s search for “introduction to theoretical linguistics”. Handy, huh?
Not perfect, however.
My really preferred solution: A new extension
Although the solution given above is the one I am currently using, there still remains another way that I would like to use YubNub if only I could. Namely, I would like to see a more sophisticated Firefox extension than any of the ones that are currently available. This, then, is a plead for such an extension, for my own coding skills are certainly not good enough to create it, myself.
What is wrong with using YubNub as my default search is that whenever I enter a YubNub command I am still taken to my destination via yubnub.org. This not only slows down the process, but sometimes yubnub.org is down and I will not be taken anywhere. Which is really annoying, because then I need to flex my memory muscles to recall where the homepage of Google is.
Consequently, what I would like to see is an extension that does not connect to yubnub.org, but keeps (and automatically updates) the list of YubNub commands within the browser. If you use the YubNub command “ls”, you get the list of all commands, and an XML feed of the latest additions is also available there. If someone could persuade Jon to include a complete list of YubNub commands in an XML format, one could fairly easily create an extension that keeps its command list up-to-date with the help of that XML list.
This would not only make it possible to use YubNub commands even when yubnub.org is down, but it would also make searches faster (at least by half a second, I would say — that’s about a week of your lifespan saved right there). Furthermore, it would take unnecessary strain out of Jon’s server, plus it would also make searching with YubNub more attractive an option for those who are overly concerned with their privacy over the Net, as now no data would be sent to yubnub.org. The only question, then, is whether Jon himself would approve of people sidestepping his service proper in this manner.
So, anyone with coding skills and willingness to contribute to the quest for a longer human life span, please think about this. With Search Engine Watch reporting 213 million daily searches made every day, by saving half a second per search we would save an equivalent of 3.38 human years per day (provided everyone would use YubNub, but then again why wouldn’t they after this marvellous new way to do it?). Consequently, if you coded an extension like the one I have described here, you could practically claim that you save a whole human life every 47 or so days (3.38 years per day makes roughly 160 years in 47 days — of course, I will take half of the credit!).
So, think about it, all you humanitarian programmers out there!
