How To Hack Bookmarks Like A Pro

So the other day I came across a post from non other than the amazing Rhea Drysdale. Rhea is a real web tools guru she knows all sorts of tools and services that can put your productivity through the roof. One of the tricks that Rhea mentioned is Rae Hoffman’s approach to hacking bookmarks.

In short, Rae uses Firefox’s Bookmarks in conjunction with custom URLs to turn your address bar into a souped up search machine! Here’s a quick example of how Rae works her magic.

Rae finds a service that uses dynamic URLs such as WhosTalkin.com She then runs a query through the service. As a result we get a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=sugarrae

Next Rae will replace the query in the URL with %s to act as a place holder. So the URL now looks like:

http://www.whostalkin.com/search?q=%s

In Firefox Rae will go to Bookmarks>Organize Bookmarks, then right click on Bookmarks Menu>New Bookmark

So now when Rae goes to her address bar and types “who sugarrae”, she will get a fresh set of results from WhosTalkin.com

Rae takes things a step further by using this hack to run analysis on pages and sites by using the URL in place of a query. For example if she wants to run a Whois check her setup might look like this:

Now when Rae types whois whostalkin.com into her search bar a Whois report from DomainTools.com appears.

Are you starting to see the magic here? If not here are a few of my favorite examples to get you started. Just copy and paste them into the method above.

Bookmarks with URLs:

Shorten URL’s
kl.am
http://kl.am/api/shorten/?url=%s&format=text
TinyURL
http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=%s

Social Bookmarking

StumbleUpon
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=%s

del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us/post?url=%s

FriendFeed
http://friendfeed.com/?url=%s

Digg
http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=%s

Sphinn
http://sphinn.com/submit.php?url=%s

View a Site as Text at SEO-Browser.com

http://www.seo-browser.com/index.php?user_agent=1&address=%s&action=Parse+URL

On Page Keyword Analysis

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-analysis-tool.shtml?url=%s

Translate any web page into English:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=%s&sl=auto&tl=en&history_state0=

Bookmarks with Search Queries:

Google News Search

http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%s&cf=all&scoring=n (sorted by date)

Google Blog Search

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=%s&scoring=d (sorted by date)

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=%s&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wl

Get Yahoo results as a RSS feed:

http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/rss/webSearch.xml?appid=yahoosearchwebrss&query=%s


Update Twitter

http://twitter.com/home?status=%s

Have fun playing with these bookmarks and feel free to leave some of your favorites in the comments! Stay tuned for my next post where I kick things up a notch with this bookmark hack and JavaScript!

Tagged as: bookmarks, hack