It’s been about 36 hours since we launched shortcuts to the world and we’ve already had thousands created. One of the features that hasn’t been talked about much is how you can create advanced shortcuts. I’m going to show you some of my favorites below. Feel free to share some of your personal favorites in the comments.
Taming tickets
We have a ticketing system here in the office which we use to keep track of bugs and feature requests. It’s not uncommon to hear someone in the office say: “What do you think about ticket 509?” or “Did you see my update to ticket 1294?” Being able to type “t 509″ or “t 1294″ and land directly on the ticket page saves me a ton of time.
Here’s how I set up our trac shortcut:
t 
http://tickets.internal.opendns.com/ticket/%s
I use it like this: t 509
Phoning my friends
I use Skype from time to time to talk to friends in foreign countries to save on the long-distance charges. I like being able to launch a phone call by just using my address bar (since I’m always using a web browser).
Here’s how it works:
call skype:%s
I use it like this: call opendns
Or, if I just want to leave a voicemail:
voicemail skype:%s?voicemail
I use it like this: voicemail opendns
Know where you’re going
Sometimes I’ll be running out of the office to visit one of our datacenters and I’ll need directions. I’ve got a shortcut called office that quickly gives me directions to any location starting from my office. This one was a bit trickier to create, and I made it using the OpenDNS shortcut bookmarklet. You can find the bookmarklet on the bottom of your shortcuts page in your account.
Here is the shortcut:
office http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&saddr=50+Fremont,+SF,+CA&daddr=%s
And here is how I use it in my browser: office 529 Bryant, Palo Alto, CA
The future of navigation is in your fingers
Shortcuts are cool. Advanced shortcuts can be powerful. What can you make them do? What do you want them to do?
timendum
Ok, THIS is a cool feature, perhaps the idea wasn’t “ours”, of us blog commenter, but, a little citation would have been kind.
(sorry for my bad english)
posted on April 25th, 2007 at 2:06 am
Paul Stamatiou
That Google Maps param shortcut is truly genius.
posted on April 25th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Wayne Smallman
I’m currently wending my way through the perilous stages of developing a series of web applications, and I’m giving some thought to building in OpenDNS functionality not only into the UI but also the search systems, too…
posted on April 26th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
Mayur
Wow! That’s a really cool feature!
I love OpenDNS!
posted on April 28th, 2007 at 5:28 am
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posted on April 29th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Ryan Parman
Actually this feature has been in Firefox for quite some time now. Pre-1.0 for sure. In Firefox they’re called “Keywords” and you can use them by right-clicking a search field, choosing to add a keyword, and giving it a name. It’s a pretty handy feature, and I’m glad that Safari, Opera, and IE users can have access to this feature now as well (I also use Safari myself).
posted on May 5th, 2007 at 11:39 am
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posted on May 5th, 2007 at 11:54 am
Renan
Great feature, but a question.
I created a ‘lastfm’ shortcut which forwards me to http://www.lastfm.pt/music/%s (i.e. I can say “lastfm someband”).
But with band names with 2 or more words I need a ‘+’ between the words (e.g. “Black Sabbath” becomes “Black+Sabbath”, so the final URL looks like http://www.lastfm.pt/music/Black+Sabbath).
Would it be possible to implement this kind of replacement?
posted on May 9th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
David Ulevitch
Renan… Let’s think about what we can do about that… LastFM would be awesome if they could turn %20 (html-encoded space) into +. Mod_Rewrite could do that, so could their code.
Oh, and rock on with Black Sabbath.
posted on May 9th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
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posted on May 11th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Doc Misterio
David and Team,
This is Incredibly genius… I myself am trying to figure out how to create these advanced shortcuts… is there a tutorial anywhere? Cause I would love to get that google maps one down and also a wikipedia one (w heroes, or w lost). Everytime I try to work it, it seems to give me some error because it’s not just right… I seem to be missing something. What is the “%s” variable? Sorry for the stupid question.
posted on May 23rd, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Doc Misterio
Yes it seems every time I try to make an advanced shortcut using the “%s” and it gives me a missing argument, “Oops. That shortcut needs a value.” error.
posted on May 24th, 2007 at 12:12 pm