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?
More than one letter, but:
rfc [some number]: RFCs at faq.org
imdb [some movie]: IMDB movie page
mt: MegaTokyo
km: Ken MacLeod’s blog
Posted by Saint Aardvark on May 20th, 2005.
Firefox shortcuts
rfc [some number]: RFCs at rfc.net
whois [name.extension]: Domain-lookup at whois.sc
dict [word]: Dictionary at dictionary.reference.com
One-character shortcuts
a: Anne van Kesteren
b: Bloglines
e: Wikipedia
j: Joshua Ink
m: misinterpreted
Posted by Henrik Lied on May 20th, 2005.
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.
Posted by sil on May 20th, 2005.
Weirdly, I tend to type in a little bit more than one character…..
Posted by mrben on May 20th, 2005.
A: Amplifico
B: Bloglines
D: Dragonninja Forums
G: Google
H: Hotmail
J: Jetplane Landing
K: Kryogenix (need to fix that later :P)
M: Guff
P: Peace Burial At Sea
Q: Daily Dinosaur Comics
Posted by Gary Fleming on May 21st, 2005.