Do you type in URLs of well known sites over and over and over again? I’ve been doing it for years because I couldn’t think of a better way to browse to frequently used sites. I didn’t want to create bookmarks for two reasons. One, I use several different machines and keeping them all in sync would be a pain. Two, the more bookmarks you get, the harder it is to find the one you’re looking for and it’s faster to just type the URL instead of searching through all your bookmarks to find the site. Now I’ve found an easier way.

First, use Foxmarks. It synchronizes your bookmarks across any number of Firefox installations, so you can create a bookmark in any of the browsers you use and the bookmark will be propagated to the rest of the instances.

Second, use the keyword field. It doesn’t have to be used only for sites that accept queries. In the past I only used quick searches for places like Google and Amazon because it was convenient to type a search phrase and go directly to the results page. It recently dawned on me that I could do the same with other frequently visited sites.

I’ve now bookmarked those sites and added a keyword to each one, so instead of typing in dan.hersam.com (which I’ve done hundreds of times) I type the ‘dan’ keyword into the URL field to visit my web site. I did the same thing for HSBC, where the login URL is https://www.ebank.us.hsbc.com/servlet/com.hsbc.us.ibank.signon.Logon but I just type ‘hsbc’.

I think of it as a personal version of tinyurl, except you get to choose the tiny url.