You know I love Firefox, right? I know that I’ve said it enough times.

Today I want to throw a brief tip out there and give you something to download to help you use Firefox to find things on the internet quicker.

Smart Search Bookmarks are something that (as far as I can tell) are unique to Firefox at this point, Opera doesn’t have them (easily accessable), nope on Google Chrome and we all know that Internet Explorer would never have something that would make web browsing this easy. Did I just hear someone ask about Netscape, seriously? It’s dead; it has to be smellier than Lazarus was by the time Jesus got to him.

So, now that we’re past my lame attempt at humor…

These bookmarks allow you to search just about any search on the internet by typing it into your location bar (the place you type “www.CruTech.org” when you want to come here) with a short prefix to make it search the right page. For example, we’re going to set it up so that if you want to search Google all you have to do is type a “g” before your search term and hit enter, like this:

To do this, go to Google.com first. Right-click (Control-Click for Macs) in the search box and choose “Add a Keyword for this Search…”

When you do that a pop-up box will, well, pop up.

In the Name box, type “Google Search” (or whatever will help you remember what it is when you look at all of your bookmarks), put “g” in the Keyword box and I’d suggest putting it in a new folder named “Searches”; you can get to the folders by clicking the small button with just the triangle in it.

Click “Add” and you’re good to go.

Go up to your search bar and type “g CruTech” and hit enter.

Ta-da!

Remeber, you can use this for just about any search box out there. I use this a ton to search on Wikipedia and other sites, including the directory for all of the sites that are associated with Campus Crusade for Christ.

I’ve included a file that you can download and import into your bookmarks. It has all of these searches included:

Prefix – Search Site
acronym – Acronym Finder
amazon – Amazon.com
ebay – eBay
flickr – Flickr (images/pictures)
froogle – Froogle Quick Search
g – Google Quick Search
image – Google Image Search
lh – LifeHacker (Technology Blog)
quot – Stock Symbol Quicksearch
technorati – Technorati (Blog Index)
thes – Thesaurus
slang – Urban Dictionary (slang search)
w – Wikipedia
local – Yahoo Local Search
fb – Facebook
ccci – CCCI Search
bible – Bible Gateway (search reference or word to find)
weather – Weather Channel (search using zip code or city name, ex. “weather 22207″)
cc – Creative Commons (great for images, text, etc with light copyrighting)
imdb – Internet Movie Database
bs – YouVersion (bible study resources, search scripture references)
half – Half.com (cheap books, etc.)
wookie – Wookiepedia (Star Wars encyclopedia)
d – Dictionary
map – Google Maps
blue – Blue Letter Bible
yt – YouTube
ebible – eBible.com

You can download the file here, right click and choose “Save link as”. Remember where you save it so you can import it to Firefox:

Bookmarks.html

Enjoy!

Over the past few weeks I’ve (with the help of a friend or two) posted about a lot of things that I know about. Now, don’t get worried – I still have plenty of ideas to carry me through. At the same time I want this site to be useful to you, the reader. So, please, take some time and hit the “comments” link and answer a few questions for me:

1. How has the “tech depth” of the posts been so far?
   • Too deep – I don’t get it.
   • Just right – I’m learning how to swim.
   • Too lite – I could have written these.
2. What would you like me to post about in the near future?
3. Is there any other feedback you want to give me?

For those of you who have wanted to write comments on the posts, you should be able to now. I’ve been wrestling with the comments options since I started the site. I’m still not sure if it’s going to work right, but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Comment away!

Welcome to CruTech.

We’ll see what this turns into; in the mean time check out the about section.

Cheers,
Jayson