I last reported on the newly released Quix bookmarklet. It’s a very powerful tool and I’ve been using it to great use but there was one thing missing. I wanted to be able to have a keyboard shortcut so I could get the quix popup at the press of a button.

Quix is compatible with just about every browser so supplying a keyboard shortcut out of the box might be tricky. I favour Chrome for browsing so I went to look for a keyboard shortcut I could use with that browser. I found the chrome extension Bookmarks Bar Keyboard Shortcuts , which gives you keyboard shortcuts for your bookmarks bar’ first ten bookmarks.

If you want to get really fancy, you can even map it to a hotkey if you have a keyboard with hotkeys. I personally use the logitech g11. It’s labelled a gaming keyboard but it’s a fantastic keyboard for web professionals because of the multitude of short keys that you can map out to perform various functions. I haven’t seen a keyboard with more hotkeys than the G11. It’s a huge time saver and so is Quix. I can bring up Quix at the click of a button, with that Quix becomes even sweeter.

Joost De Valk just released an extremely useful bookmarklet that acts like a swiss army knife and works in all the major browsers. In essence his bookmarklet called Quix will bring up a dialog box in which you can enter a shortcode for a wide array of common actions like checking whois, searching the dictionary for a selected word, checking nofollow links, checking the webarchives for the webpage history, finding links on the web pointing toward the domain, sharing the page on facebook and much much more. The best way to find out what it can do is visiting the quix help page for an overview. The make things better is, he’s made it easy to create your own extensions. Which is great because it allows one to reduce the amount of bookmarklets, which declutters the browser bars.

one bookmarklet to rule them all!

A quick tip for those that are wanting to change their browsing habits:

Let’s say you have a list of usual suspects, a number of sites you browse to almost automatically but really distract you from your work. Here is one way to limit browsing to those sites that requires no toolbars nor does it demand system resources. Open your hosts file and add the names of the sites like this:
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

save the file without accidentally adding an extension (like txt). The hosts file doesn’t have an extension!

You can find the hosts file typically in your windows folder under /system32/drivers/etc

Power tip:
So maybe you only want to restrict sites for certain parts of the day?

Here’s a way of doing that using two simple executable .bat files. It is important to note though that in certain operating systems this might not work fluently without altering your windows security settings.

1) Create a second hosts file and add the list of sites to it. Save the file in a specific directory that you have created.
2) Now create a directory to which you can move the original hosts file.
3) Open a text editor and create a bat file and have it move the original hosts file to the directory you created in step 2. Then move the custom hosts file you created in step 1 into the original directory as a replacement. Here is how it looks:

move “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\original\
move “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\restricted\hosts” C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\

Save the text with the .bat extension. Make sure to make a shortcut and put the shortcut so you can easily execute the file whenever you want to browse without distractions.

4) Create another .bat file in similar fashion, but now you want to restore the original hosts file
That could look like something like this:

move “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts” C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\restricted\
move “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\original\hosts” C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\

Give it an appropriate filename, create a shortcut, then run it whenever you want to browse freely!

5) OPTIONAL: use a scheduler to run the two bat files at specific times in the day. Windows comes with a task scheduler by default. You can run and execute a file at specific times in the day.

Keep in mind that it mind that it might require a browser-restart for the new hosts file to take in effect.

Happy browsing!

I stumbled upon a very nifty little ninja gmail trick that helps me keep track of where spam is coming from. Every time we give supply an email address, the potential is there for that email address to be compromised and fall into the hands of a spammer. Only recently even the trusted Aweber suffered a breach which resulted in a lot of spam being delivered. It’s an unfortunate occurrence but there is always that chance, even with a variety of measures in place.

There is a way of finding out what source leaked your email address and making it very easy to filter out all subsequent spamming, that is, if you’re a gmail user!

The next time you pass your email address to a website via opt-in or what have you, apply this little known trick:

Instead of typing in your formal email address, add a period somewhere in your email and at the end close with: +whateveridentifieryouwanttouse.

So for example:

johntravoltasmit.h+outwit@gmail.com

You see, Gmail will ignore the placement of periods and ignores everything after the + sign. You will receive the email just as normal…except now you can easily find all inbound email by the email address you supplied, create a filter for it and if you like, have it go directly to trash. The next time you find yourself overwhelmed by a sudden rush of spam, you might actually be able to pinpoint what source leaked the address.

ps.
if you’d be using johntravoltasmit.h+outwit@gmail.com as your address,
enter this as a search in gmail to find all inbound email:

“to:johntravoltasmit.h@gmail.com”

You can’t however use the + sign in a gmail search query.