Did you know that Firefox bookmarks have a cool feature called keywords? If you right-click any bookmark in Firefox and select “Properties”, you’ll see an entry called “Keyword:” with a blank text box next to it. You can enter any word you’d like to use as your own personal keyword; for example, the address for the Ars Technica “The Lounge” forum is:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/frm/f/34709834
However, I have made lounge my keyword for that shortcut, so all I need to type is lounge into the address bar and the above page will load! Some of my other keywords include:
me – this site
yellow – http://www.realpageslive.com
damn – http://www.damninteresting.com
feed – http://feedvalidator.org
goof – http://www.myspace.com/jimcofer
Remember, Firefox keywords can be just about anything you wish. You can also use %s as a wildcard for searches if you’d like; for example, I could bookmark the myspace.com home page, then edit the bookmark to read http://www.myspace.com/%s with a keyword of msp. If I then typed msp jimcofer into the address bar, Firefox would put the jimcofer where the %s is in the keyword, so it would go to my profile (http://www.myspace.com/jimcofer). Typing msp someoneelse would take me to http://www.myspace.com/someoneelse and so on. In fact, there’s a whole slew of little tricks you can use with keywords; a good list of them is here.