I love RottenTomatoes.com. It’s one of the most useful and addictive movie sites I’ve found, right along with IMDB.com. Now I can look up movies on either database in a snap by using a surprisingly little-known Firefox feature that lets you assign a keyword of your choice to any search on any site.
I’ve set up my browser so that I can type “rt [moviename]” or “imdb [moviename]” in my Firefox addressbar and be whisked right to that movie’s page in RottenTomatoes or IMDB respectively.
It’s easy to do! Just go to your favorite site (movie or otherwise) in Firefox and right-click on a search bar on the page (e.g., where you’d normally enter in a movie to look up) and then select “Add a Keyword for this Search.” You’ll then see something like this:
Enter in any title you want in the first box (that’s what’ll show up in your bookmarks), choose a short but easy to remember keyword, and the URL should be filled in automatically for you.
From then on, you can enter in stuff like “rt an inconvenient truth” (great movie, btw!) directly into your Firefox addressbar and save yourself the hassle of navigating to the RT homepage, then finding the search box, etc.
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But what if you’d like to make use of such a handy feature at home and work (or on your personal desktop and laptop) and don’t want to set up such shortcuts multiple times?
Google Browser Sync to the rescue! (insert standard disclaimer here… I work for Google, I don’t work on this particular product, I’m not paid to write this, yadda yadda yadda). It’s a super-nifty way of having your bookmarks, cookies, and other stuff (you choose!) automatically synchronized across all your computers. And yes, privacy-keen geeks, you can opt to have all of this stuff encrypted, too :-D. The downside: This extension causes my Firefox to load more slowly (sometimes taking 10-15 seconds), but I’m guessing that’s because I have a crapload of settings, extensions, bookmarks, etc. It’s still well worth the initial load-wait for me.
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Anyway, I hope you find these tips helpful, and feel free to share any of your own Firefox tips below! 😀
What do you think?