Bookmark Magic with Alfred — Personal Productivity
Bookmarks. Most people’s browsers are probably full of either accidental bookmarks, or some sort of sloppy “I’ll just read this later”-list. I’ll happily admit, that was what my bookmarks looked like until I discovered the possibilities that Alfred offers when you combine it with a little bit of structure (and discipline).
Searching your Browser’s bookmarks is one of Alfred’s free features, which I briefly mentioned in my other post that introduced Alfred as a Spotlight replacement. On its own, this makes even the biggest pile of randomly collected bookmarks more usable. You can simply type some word you remember in the name of a website and chances are, Alfred will find it for you.
However, there’s a power hidden behind this simple search. What if you imposed structure on your bookmarks? Yes, forget about the name of the website that the developer entered in his/her <title>-tag. If you have a website you visit regularly, you’ll probably want your brain to learn mnemonics for it. Here’s an example:
The website Buienradar is a precipitation radar for the Netherlands. A website I visit at least twice a day, because failing to do so may cause me to blindly bicycle into a downpour on the way to work/home. This website is now available to me through typing ⌘-Space, buie,
. The website’s own title has a whole bunch of SEO-keywords, which would just clutter other searches. So, when making this bookmark, I trimmed the title down to Buienradar.
Okay, that’s probably not terribly exciting yet. I can hear you think “any browser’s address bar can do this”. True, one big benefit here is that Alfred can do it from any application. The browser does not need to have focus. Bear with me though. If you are a developer, take note, you will probably relate to what comes next.
At any client, I usually have to maintain a set of bookmarks just for the various locations of the DEV, TEST, ACC and PROD environments. If you structure your bookmarks, those could be accessible like this:
See? Now that is starting to look like magic. I can now navigate to the DEV-environment, or the Continuous Integration pipeline or the GitLab-repository simply by typing ⌘-Space, app- and selecting one of these alternatives.
I’ve found that prefixing the title of a bookmark with a mnemonic helps me find things a whole lot faster. I use it to open things from my most used Trello boards (prefix TR-), to my various Google Drive accounts (prefix GD-), to my financial tooling (prefix FT-) and webcomics (prefix WC-). See the pattern already? If not, this is the pattern for the names of bookmarks that I use:
<mnemonic prefix> | <short meaningful title>To set this up, you do need to go through your bookmarks and rename any of them that have a real use for you. Trust me though, it’s absolutely worth the investment. Even after several uses, your brain will start to love the shortcuts. After all, your brain is always trying to reduce its energy-usage for simple tasks and so mnemonics are a fantastic way to do that.
Give it a try, even if it is just by making the one URL you visit most often during the day more accessible. Once you see and feel its potential, you will probably start building your own system and before you know it, people won’t know how the heck you navigate through the internet as fast you do.
That’s it for this feature of Alfred. Next up will be a little more exciting: the first post on using Workflows to help you generate data. Coming soon! 😃
Cheers,
— JH
