---
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.
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:
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)