How to Use Is.Gd/Tiny Url/Bookmarklet-X in Chrome

This morning I got sick of having to constantly open my bookmark toolbar to use Is.Gd (it just messes with the zen of Chrome) so I tried to figure out how to have it as a shortcut.

One option is to name the bookmark something like !gd, while this works, you have to type it in and press (down) twice, then enter. Not my cup of tea.

As it turns out Chrome doesn’t really need a query for a search engine, if you make a engine with no location for the query string pressing Enter will invoke it immediately.

So here are the steps:

1. Right click on the link.
2. Select copy link address.
3. (Wrench) -> Options
4. Basics tab.
5. To the right of “Default Search:” click Manage.
6. Click Add.
7. Give it a name (mine was Is.Gd)
8. Give it a keyword (like !isgd).
9. Paste in the URL.
10. Ok. Close. Close.
11. Right click the bookmark on your bookmark tab.
12. Delete.

I tend to create bang-like keywords; just put an exclamation point in front of them.

The only shortcoming right now is that the bookmarks cant contain braces (“{” and “}”) and you may need to tweak them – a little. Jon Galloway has an ace bookmarklet that will switch MSDN to the low bandwidth view. The original format of the link is:

javascript:
 if(document.cookie.indexOf('LoBandEnabled=yes')<0)
 {
  document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=yes;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';
 }
 else
 {
  document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=no;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';
 }
 window.location.reload();

The first thing you can do is to strip off the window.location.reload();, Chrome does that in any case. The second thing you will have to do is to split it into two seperate bookmarklets.

document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=yes;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';

document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=no;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';

Finally turn them into methods and add the javascript prefix:

javascript:void(document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=yes;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';)

javascript:void(document.cookie='LoBandEnabled=no;path=/;domain=.microsoft.com;%20expires=Wed,%2001-Aug-2040%2008:00:00%20GMT';)

You can then create two bookmarklets. Mine were !mlon and !mloff.