Keyword shortcuts support in Flock

One of my favorite semi-hidden Firefox feature is keyword shortcuts. When I want to search for something, I hit Ctrl+T, ? foo and Firefox will search Google for “foo”. This works because I have the Google search URL “http://www.google.com/search?q=%s” connected with the keyword “?”. This works great for me, and means that I can hide the Search Bar normally visible at the top of the browser. In addition to the Google shortcut, I have them set up for IMDB, Wikipedia, and Technorati.

I had recently been wondering if Flock supported keyword shortcuts. I found Flock Bug 1364: Add Support for Keyword Favorite Shortcuts which requests support for this functionality. From reading through the bug comments, shortcuts created through the “Add a Keyword for this Search…” context menu are recognized. However, these links cannot be edited from the Flock Favorites Manager. The request is to integrate keyword shortcuts into the Favorites Manager.

It looks like this feature request is rated as a high-priority enhancement targetted for the next major Flock Beta, so it looks like it’ll get some attention in the future.

Back in the pre-Firefox 1.0 days, POST forms could not receive keywords. Some talented Mozilla employees and/or volunteers spent some development cycles to add POST keyword support as well as the right-click “Add Keyword” context menu item. This feature just effing works. Effing works great.

I was able to use the POST shortcut support a bit at my last job, as a contract Web Developer at Shareholder.com. General client information was stored on our Intranet. To change the company information you were viewing, you had to enter or select the client name. By using the keyword support in Firefox, I could more easily view different clients. Typing “<keyword> clientcompany” would allow me to switch to a view of clientcompany’s data. Authentication information just plain worked correctly, so I was prompted to enter my username/password when appropriate. Awesome stuff.

Firefox keyword shortcuts save me time and money every day, and I look forward to seeing them work in Flock. What can they do for you?

More information on keyword shortcuts:

• Keyword Repository
• Mozilla keywords – Factbites (a pretty neat site which pulls out multiple relevant text results from pages)

Tags: Flock, Firefox

Blogged with Flock

British slang

Yesterday the consultant we has in from the UK explained a great phrase for Friday: POETS: Piss off early tomorrow’s Saturday.  Awesome stuff.

Blogged with Flock

Hello world!

The folks in #flock-dev leaned on me until I broke down in tears and got a WordPress blog.

OK, so I didn't cry… a lot… but I got the blog set up.

For the most part, I'll be using this to test Flock's blog integration and insights from work at $employer. My old slightly-stale MSN Spaces space is at AndLife.