(Note: this post by reddit user megadrive is responsible for the light-bulb clicking in my brain)
Do you remember a time when “clean urls” were not the norm on the web? Those were the days I tell you, and by days I mean, bad days.
The combination of clean URLs and editible search engines in the Chromium web browser has opened up an avenue for a number of shortcuts one can add to their web browsing experience.
Basically, you take any site you regularly visit a standard set of URLs for,
let’s say Twitter for example. A standard (without the idiotic hash-bang) looks
like: http://twitter.com/agentdero where the last token of the URL is the
username.
With Chrome/Chromium’s magic address bar, you can create a “custom search
engine” to go straight to a user’s profile, with a search engine URL of:
http://twitter.com/%s
Once you start to see the opportunities for tokenizing URLs on other sites, you can start to create a littany of short-cuts to get to just about any page on any site you frequent. Below are some of the short-cuts that I currently have configured for reference:
Sometimes it’s the novel little hacks that make me happy, the little bit of custom search functionality in Chromium is one of the few bits of polish that really goes a long way with me compared to the other guys