Perform any task often enough you’re bound to create a few shortcuts. I’m a Firefox devotee and an avid Twitter user so I’ve developed a shorthand system that I couldn’t live without. So whether you are visiting twitter profiles or searching twitter for a trend or keyword. Here’s how I made these tasks more efficient.
Visiting a Twitter profile.
- Old Way: Copy the @username, paste to address bar, delete the “@” symbol, add “http://twitter/” to the beginning, hit enter.
- New Way: Create a new bookmark and in the location field type “http://twitter.com/%s” minus the quotes, set “@” as the keyword and save the bookmark.
- Now you can simply type “@ username” in your address bar to visits the profile of any twitter user. Note: There is a space required between the @ and username, I haven’t found a work around but this is still easier.
Searching Twitter
- Old Way: Visit http://search.twitter.com, enter keyword, hit enter
- New Way: Create a new bookmark and in the location field type “http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%s” minus the quotes, set “searchtwitter” or “twittersearch” (something easy for you to remember) as the keyword.
- Now you can type searchtwitter followed by your search term in the address bar. (e.g. searchtwitter Iran)
- Alternate Method: Visit Search.twitter.com, hit the drop down by your search engine and add it to your available searches. For an even better experience add Twazzup or Topsy as your search engine.
Checking your RTs
As I’ve mentioned before new style RTs don’t show up in many Twitter clients. Here’s a quick way to check for new style RTs
Create a bookmark for “http://twitter.com/#retweeted_of_mine” and add the keyword “myRT”. 4 letters and you are instantly seeing any of your tweets that have been retweeted using the new system.
Shortcuts to Shortcuts – Too busy to create your own. Download all three shortcuts, unzip, and add them to your favorites.
Bonus Bookmark Goodness
Here are some other very useful bookmark shortcuts
- Search Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=%s
- Search Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%s
- Search Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s
- YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=%s
- Thesaurus (Reference.com): http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/%s
- Define (Merriam Webster): http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s
I’m always looking for better ways of doing something so I’d like to know What quick searches do you use? What other tasks can we shortcut using Firefox? Comment below or reply to @tsudo on Twitter.
I hope these tricks make your browsing a bit better and a bit more efficient. Thanks for reading.
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