This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

And this is One-character shortcuts, written , and concerning Web, Musings

Talking to Jono and Ade in the pub, it appears that I’m not the first person to notice this. I have implicit one-character shortcuts for some websites. For example, if I want to go to forums.lugradio.org then I seem to have subconsciously trained myself to just hit “f” in the address bar of my browser, and then down-arrow, enter. I didn’t explicitly set that up, but I go there often enough that it always works. Herewith, a list of the other ones I have subconsciously trained myself to use:

a: internal server at work
b: Bloglines
c: Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber
d: internal server at work
f: LugRadio Forums
g: Gmail
k: My site
s: The Straight Dope

Obviously each letter does bring up a list of URLs, but that’s just coincidence; the ones above I’ve actually learned, Pavlovianly, to use as shortcuts.

Where do your letters go?

Comments

sil

Hm. “rfc” is an explicitly set up shortcut, no? I didn’t really mean those, more the ones that just “happen” to work because of the autocomplete nature of the address bar.

mrben

Weirdly, I tend to type in a little bit more than one character…..

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.