Today is the 6 year anniversary of Nancy and I starting dating.
Since then, we’ve graduated high school, gone to college, moved in together and lived in 4 different places, dealt with my dad dying, graduated college, gotten a dog and a cat, bought a house, started careers, gotten married, gotten pregnant, had a miscarriage, gotten pregnant again, dealt with a rough pregnancy, dealt with natural childbirth, and here we are 2 months after Charlie was born. Hopefully it’s time to slow down now? No? Dang.
Early in the 2000 season, Maddux was asked by sportswriter Bob Nightengale what had been the most memorable at-bat of his pitching career. Maddux said it was striking out Dave Martinez to end a regular season game. Nightengale was surprised Maddux hadn’t picked a postseason game, or a more famous player. Maddux explained:
“I remember that one because he got a hit off me in the same situation (full count, bases loaded, two out in the 9th inning) seven years earlier. I told myself if I ever got in the same situation again, I’ll pitch him differently. It took me seven years, but I got him.”
— Greg Maddux on Wikipedia
Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (and maybe even IE, I’m not sure), all support pretty sophisticated custom search engines and shortcuts, allowing you to search sites pretty easily with just a shortcut key. These are useful for far more than you might think at first glance.
Let’s start boring and take the classic search example: Google. Say you want to search Google by typing “g searchterm” in your address bar (assuming browser didn’t already let you search Google). To do this, you’d create a new custom search, add the shortcut key (“g”) and the URL (http://www.google.com/search?q=%s - note that the %s will get replaced with your search term) and save it. Now type “g awesome” and you will Google the word “awesome.” Meh, right?
Here’s the good part: this isn’t just useful for searching. Since all you’re doing is just sticking a custom word or phrase at an arbitrary location in an arbitrary URL, you can get kind of fancy with it.
Here are some quick examples:
See what I mean? If you frequently type in URLs that have a predictable structure, this can be a huge time saver.
Bonus: you can just remove %s from the URL altogether to have instant keyword-accessible bookmarks.
If you want Firefox or Chrome to stop trying to auto-complete a specific URL, you can remove it from the list with Shift+Delete.
