# YubNub and UofT library catalogue access


![](http://yubutils.sourceforge.net/images/logo.jpg)[YubNub](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YubNub)
was created in June 2005 as the result of a one-day programming contest
in [Ruby on Rails](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails), a very
rapid and neat web-framework for Ruby. It bills itself as a “social
commandline for the web”, and it’s pretty neat. Let me explain. Not many
people know that browsers like Firefox have the opportunity to create
web shortcuts (through the bookmark menu), so for example if you often
go to Wikipedia to search for something, you could make the shortcut wp,
which would enable you to type

*wp ruby on rails*

which would perform the Wikipedia search, and take you to that page.
This is a big timesaver, however trying to figure out how to make web
bookmarks for various sites is a major pain, and it’s also stupid to
keep reinventing the wheel. So the idea with YubNub is that you can
create a commmand, and make it public, and let everyone else use it.
Then they took it further, and let people build on each others commands.
It’s pretty cool.

You can either go to [Yubnub.org](http://www.yubnub.org) and run
commands from there directly, or there are many ways of [“installing”
yubnub in your
browser](http://www.yubnub.org/documentation/describe_installation),
depending on which browser you are using. For example, in my browser
([Camino](http://www.caminobrowser.org)), I can type “y (yubnub
command)” in my address field, and it does what it’s supposed to. For
example “y wp norway” will give me the Wikipedia page for Norway. “y
gimyim cars” will split my browser window in two, and show hits from
Google Images search on cars on one side, and hits from Yahoo Images on
the other. “y fccca eiffel tower” searches for [Creative
Commons](http://www.creativecommons.org) licensed pictures on Flickr.
And so on.

And today I made my humble contribution to the command list. I had
planned to try doing this for a week or so, but had a major essay to
finish first. Now you can use **utcat** to search the **[University of
Toronto library](http://main.library.utoronto.ca)** for keywords or
authors, and **uttitle** to search for book titles. Combine this with “y
gs efficiency” which searches [Google
Scholar](http://scholar.google.com), and you are ready to do research
for that paper! (And don’t forget y gmt norway for when you need to call
your family.)

(Note that in listing my favorite commands, I prefixed them with a “y” -
this is because that is my particular way of invoking YubNub, you might
put it in your search-engine field, without a prefix, or use another
method to invoke it. See the installation guide linked to above).

This whole concept fits well into what I remember telling Wojciech about
the reason I love Google so much: It resembles a command line. Granted,
graphical systems are great, but the commandline is so much faster
sometimes. Before, to get a currency quote, I had to go to xe.com, and
choose “list more currencies”, and then find NOK and CAD on long
drop-down lists. Now, I can do the following in Google “(230 \*1.15) CAD
/ lb in NOK / kg”, which takes a price in Candian pounds, adds 15%
taxes, and gives me the Norwegian price in kilos. Brilliant. And so much
faster. An interesting point is that when speech-input to computers
takes off, in a way, parsing them will resemble parsing a commandline.

Stian\
 *[YubNub as a distributed operating system for the web\
](http://www.nivi.com/blog/article/rss-is-the-tcpip-of-web-20-ii-yubnub/)[How
YubNub can make you rewire your brain
patterns](http://yubnub.blogspot.com/2006/03/yubnub-is-rewiring-my-thought-paths.html)\
 [A really weird command - search the digits of
PI](http://nivi.com/blog/article/my-first-yubnub-command)\
 [Genuine VC does some higher level thinking about
YubNub](http://www.genuinevc.com/archives/2005/09/thinking_about.htm)*