Here’s a really neat trick that saves me a lot of time. It’s nothing new, but I don’t think it’s widely-known.

Let’s say that you have a tool you often use that just changes the URL. For example, using Trac for storing bugs. I might want to look up Trac #1234, and the URL is something like /ticket/view/1234. Rather than searching through the system, I can just hack the URL to change the number. But that’s a pain.

So you can set up a keyword. Instead of typing http://trac.lan/tickets/view/1234, I can just type “trac 1234” and it’ll construct the URL. That’s the magic of Firefox bookmarks. Simply bookmark a link, change the variable portion of the bookmarked to “%s”, and define a unique “keyword” field. Then visit them by typing in “keyword variable” in the location bar; if “trac” was your keyword, you’d type in “trac 1234” and hit enter. Viola! Set them for Trac, SANS port lookup, dictionaries, or all sorts of secret internal tools you might have. This obviously won’t work for things that don’t have hackable URLs, but an awful lot do.