Ken Allen's parameter trick

Ken Allen wrote me about a neat trick he used for the marchives command (for searching heavy-metal archives). First trick is that ${-} allows you to use "--" to separate two parameters (which looks kinda neat), as follows:

marchives -t band -- funeral urn

Second trick is to use %s in case the user forgets or does not wish to use the -t or --, like so:

marchives funeral urn

Here's how he did it. Note the ${-} and the %s:

http://www.metal-archives.com/search.php?type=${t=band}&string=${-}%s

Thanks Ken!

Screencast by Don McAllister: YubNub + LaunchBar (OS X) Integration

Don McAllister told me he's created a screencast on how you can integrate YubNub commands with Launchbar (OS X).

YubNub Bookmarklet by Brian Armknecht

Brian Armknecht has written a bookmarklet for YubNub (works on Firefox; doesn't seem to work on IE). Brian writes: "There are occasions where I'd like to perform a YubNub command on some text on a webpage (e.g. a word I'd like to define, or an address I'd like to map). I created a new YubNub bookmarklet for this. First highlight the text, then click the bookmarklet. A dialogue box pops up to ask the YubNub command to be used. It then performs that command on the highlighted text.". Thanks Brian!

YubNub Firefox Toolbar by Gabriel Kent

Gabriel Kent has begun work on a Firefox Toolbar for YubNub. (Pretty website too, btw). It's currently quite simple, and Gabriel is inviting people to help out.

Generating dynamic web pages with YubNub

Shantanu Oak (who has been doing some neat YubNub experiments that I want to blog about sometime) makes this interesting observation on the mailing list:

yubnub can be used to create web pages on the fly.
For e.g.

echo hello {echoshortcut staff}, <br> {echoshortcut confirm}<p> regards,<br> {echoshortcut shantanu}

Typing this command will generate a web page with the contents stored in the alias confirm. As you can see, you can store anything in the alias, an email, a message, a URL or even a picture! (coming soon)

You can print, bookmark or include (using PHP) the auto-generated page.

YSPs, anyone?