Academic Productivity

I never got on with bookmarks. There a couple of reasons. One hails back to many years a go when the internet was a much more hostile frontier town environment, where permalinks probably weren’t even an idea, when websites come and went and stuff got moved around a lot, leaving bookmarks to a link to 404′s. They take up space on your browser as a toolbar. Another reason, perhaps the main one, is I forget having them, and the effort involved in trying to find a bookmark that I might possibly have outweighs the probability of gain in finding it. I do keep try to store obscure sites or bits information I want to keep, but not through using bookmarks. They go into my notebook, which is currently housed in google notebooks.

But enough preamble. I do use a form of bookmarks, which involves one of my favourite applications, Slickrun. Slickrun can perform several functions. Its primary role is an application, file and folder launcher, but a close second is a tool to search the internet. I will blog about the usefulness of its search tools, especially for academics, in a separate post, but now to the meat of this post. A subset of this internet searching functionality is provided by a use which I am now going to describe – Slickrun as a replacement for bookmarks.

Are you feeling lucky, punk?

I didn’t use the “I’m feeling Lucky” box on google much, partly because it disappears once you have done some searching. But now I use it all the time, though indirectly.

Slickrun has the ability to pass commandline parameters to websites. With Slickrun you setup “Magicwords” which are words or mnemonic letters which you can associate with programs, files or websites. I have GL for google lucky search. An example, I type “gl guardian” and it will take me to the Guardian unlimited. Slickrun remembers previously used commands, so I actually just type “gl gu” and it will autocomplete the rest of the entry. This process isn’t in infallible for some sites and more complex search terms, as it does depend on whatever comes up number on google for whatever your google lucky search term is. But for popular sites it works. To further illustrate, I use this for the suite of google affiliated I use on a daily basis. E.g. I type “gl g (tab-key) r” to bring up google reader, as it autocomplete the g=google and r=reader once I have used it before, and “gl g (tab-key) p” for the google personalised homepage. Slickrun also allows the creation of magic words just for specific websites, which I also use for my most favourite of the favourites, but the advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t require any setup or remembering which sites I have set up magic words for and which I haven’t. More on the wonders of slickrun in posts to come…

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 3:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.