me, 2.0: ducky 0.9 (pre)

me, 2.0: jose nazario beauty and the street

ducky 0.9 (pre)

http://monkey.org/~jose/figs/IMG_1947.jpg

i've put together a tool called 'ducky'. inspired by the tool yubnub, described as "the realization of a very big idea: the URL command line of the web OS" (via joe quino's blog entry describing it). instead, ducky is designed to be my CLI to the web.

the basic idea behind ducky isn't terribly new, in fact it uses a number of web service libraries: mark pikgrim's pyGoogle, pyAmazon, and a host of other things like pyYahoo, and pyTechnorati, and some code i cribbed from the pyFeedster code to get searches in a bunch of other engines working. what is new is that it's one tool, not a dozen, and it all operates in much the same way.

i basically don't like having to call a bunch of tools just to get a simple question answered (ie "what is EVDO?"), or even change my workspace (from iTerm to Firefox) to do the same. i'm sorta lazy, but i like to think i'm more efficient.

some years ago i wrote a small tool, cligoogle, that did much the same. google some terms, get back some answers. had a few neat features, but was fragile since i scraped HTML. now i just use XML or a web service if it's present, a lot less fragile.

so, why use a single tool? well, basically, i worry that the promise of web services is buried beneath a big annoyance, namely dealing with a lot of overhead. who wants to write a lot of XML, or write to different APIs, just to do the same thing on different sites? not i, and i bet not you.

so, let's hear it for the command line, one of my favorite places to be. i can easily access my command line from almost anywhere in the world i can get SSH access, i can't always access my browser/laptop. i can work more quickly without worrying about page loads. and i can script it more readily.

some suggested uses for ducky:

scheduled searches on dynamic search sites (ie technorati, yahoo news)
comparison searching in a flash
quickly mailing someone the info they need from a search result

see DuckyTool for more info.

and kudos to jon for yubnub ...

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