Add post on chrome shortcuts

_posts/2011-07-03-chrome-shortcuts-for-the-web.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Chrome and shortcuts for the web
+tags:
+- chrome
+- learnings
+---
+
+(Note: [this
+post](http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/iabvw/how_to_make_getting_to_subreddits_easier_in/)
+by reddit user [megadrive](http://www.reddit.com/user/megadrive) is responsible
+for the light-bulb clicking in my brain)
+
+
+Do you remember a time when
+"[clean urls](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Clean_URL)" 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](http://www.chromium.org/) 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.
+
+<img
+src="http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/chromium_twitter_search.png"
+alt="Auto-completing a twitter profile" align="right"/>
+
+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:
+
+<img
+src="http://agentdero.cachefly.net/unethicalblogger.com/images/chromium_search_engines.png"
+alt="Custom Search Engines in Chromium"/>
+
+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](http://mozilla.org)