Developer Toolbox - Better Bookmarks w/OpenBook

If you are like me you have a lot of bookmarks. Actually for most things I now dump them in del.icio.us but I keep a lot of project related bookmarks locally. OpenBook is a neat Firefox extension that gives you some additional properties when adding bookmarks.

This extension allows for customization of the Add Bookmark dialog. The bookmarks tree can be automatically opened and elements can be hidden. The entire dialog can even be bypassed.

OpenBook extension My favorite is the “Keyword” attribute you can add for each bookmark. Say you are always going to coldfusionbloggers.org. You can add a keyword ‘cfb’ for example. Next time you want to visit simply type in ‘cfb’ in the address bar. Voila - you are there.

I have lots of shortcuts setup for my projects. Another handy trick is to setup shortcuts for your different servers - production, development, etc:

  • projectnamedev
  • projectnameprd
  • projectnamelh (localhost)

3 Comments

  1. Posted February 29, 2008 at 4:02 pm | Permalink

    The base FF2 install offers the keyword capability. http://robwilkerson.instantspo.....x-Keywords

    FF3 adds tagging, which is kind of handy.

  2. Posted February 29, 2008 at 5:47 pm | Permalink

    Interesting!! Not sure about Windows but at home on Ubuntu (Firefox 2.0.0.12) if I simply hit Bookmarks > Bookmark This Page… I don’t see the keyword dialog. I have to add the bookmark then edit it’s properties in order to add a keyword.

    If I have the OpenBook extension I see that regardless of which method I use to add a bookmark.

  3. Posted February 29, 2008 at 10:10 pm | Permalink

    The “keyword” feature is actually built in to Firefox, but it’s not exposed at the “Add Bookmark” dialog. You need to go to the bookmark’s properties.

    You can also use the %s string to specify where you want the text to go after your keyword. For example, if you set up a bookmark for google with a keyword of “go” and a url of: http://www.google.com/search?&q=%s

    You could type “go the crumb” to do a Google search for “the crumb”.

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