Ok, so my buddy Ben opened my eyes to an entirely new world and my life has been changing ever since. He introduced me to the simple and oft-ignored feature of Keyword Bookmarks. This oh so simple and ever so available feature is so little known I thought I should tell my piece of the internet all about it.

So the idea is when you book mark something, you give it a keyword. That keyword can then be typed all by itself into the address bar of your browser and it will navigate to that bookmark. See this example:

So now when to check my netvibes page I just type nv and go! Nifty eh? I know what you’re thinking. Just ask Ben, when he asked me if I used keyword bookmarks I scoffed “pssh, I don’t use bookmarks. I use del.icio.us! :P.” Now here is where it gets revolutionary. You can add variables in the link by placing a %s. For example:

Notice the %s on the end of the link there. Now,

I type my keyword “g” followed by a space and my variable “homestar.” GO!

Wooshtahua! My google results page materializes before my eyes. You see here this opens up a whole world of efficient possibility. Again, nothing that new here, just a good way to speed up your processes and improve productivity! The hardest part of using these is figuring out where to stick the %s. Typically I’ll go to a search page and search for a word like “thromborax” and then locate “thromborax” in the resulting URL. For your convenience, I’ll share some of my favorite shortcuts so far.

When I’m looking for stock images I always go to sxc.hu first.
http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml?f=search&txt=%s&w=1&x=0&y=0

Wikipedia.org is great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

This one was tougher to crack but oh was it worth it. GoogleMaps.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=%s

New possibilities reveal themselves daily. I hope you enjoyed our little tutorial today. Maybe there’ll be more to follow.