When I’m not working on TaxiMe I like to dabble on other fun stuff. Tonight I came home and explored Mozilla’s hot new labs widget, Ubiquity.

Download It! (v2.0)

(after you install Ubiquity).

For those of you who don’t know what Ubiquity here are a few note from Mozilla’s website:

Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Make it extremely easy to Extend browser functionality, and share new functionality with other users.
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Empower users to control the web browser using a natural-language-like command interface. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

RSS Command

After a few hours I came up with my own little RSS script. It’s incredibly easy to add your own commands in Ubiquity, all you need is a little javascript knowledge. Did I mention it uses jQuery?! When I heard that I almost shed a tear – how lovely, an API that accepts jQuery.

You can type “rss www.anysite.com” and it will pick up the RSS feed on that site. The RSS feed must be in the head of the document in a link tag with a type attribute of “application/rss+xml”. If you have multiple RSS feeds in the head of your document, you can specify which one you want as demonstrated in the image below.

Sample usage of a blog with multiple RSS feeds: Veerle’s blog has multiple RSS feeds, so to specify which one I want all I need to do is type “rss veerle.duoh.com@2. The @ followed by the feed number you want to target – pretty easy eh?