Building Y!Shortcut URLs
| Monday, July 10th, 2006 | --jr |
Ever have one of those mornings when you just can't get your brain working right? Yeah, that's today for me.
I just spent a few minutes telling a few folks this tip when I realized "Hey, this is actually pretty cool."
Wanna build your own Yahoo! Open Shortcut URL? It's actually pretty simple.
The formula is:
http://search.yahoo.com/osc/set?sc=tagName&defn=MIME encoded URL&p=!set.
- tagName
- is the single word "tag" to use after the "!" (e.g. ycool)
- MIME encoded URL
- is the URL with all the funky bits changed over to URL safe values. e.g. the Y!CoolThing url is (http%3A//ycoolthing.com). You don't need to do all the characters, but here's a quick cheat sheet of the most common three.
? %3F & %26 : %3A You can also use %s to insert stuff after the keyword.
So if the Y!CoolThing search url for finding stuff about "Shortcuts" is:
http://ycoolthing.com/?s=Shortcuts
then the Y!Open Shortcut url is:
http://search.yahoo.com/osc/set?sc=ycool&defn=http%3a//ycoolthing.com/%3Fs=%s&p=!set
and hopefully clicking on that link will take you to a confirmation page and will add it.
This means that you can use the Control+K search box in Firefox, Control+E box in IE7 (or whatever keystroke you need to get to the Yahoo! Specific searchbox in your favorite browser) to do ! shortcuts, and so long as you've logged into Yahoo!, those shortcuts are available to you.
Kinda handy if you want to provide folks a "two click" (there's a confirmation screen) way to either get to or do stuff with your site.