Table of Contents
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Intro
There's a little trick I thought should be shared with the masses since it makes the wiki incredibly useful. Imagine if you could put your cursor in the address bar of your browser, type something like 'bso', press the spacebar, then a character's name, then enter, and your browser took you directly to http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/<character's_name>. Also imagine you want to be able to search the wiki easily in a similar manner, so you've set that up to be triggered by typing 'bsos', space bar, then your search query, and enter.
In this tutorial, I'm going to teach you how to setup both of these so you can execute them without your hands ever having to leave the keyboard, and I'll teach you some shortcuts I've built into the wiki to make this even more usable.
Once you know this trick, you should be able to do this for all sorts of sites all on your own.
Chrome
I will be using Chrome for this, since the feature is supported natively (meaning without extensions or apps to download).
Setup
- Open Chrome settings (go to 'chrome://settings/' in your address bar)
- In the search bar for settings, search for 'search engine'
- Click 'Manage Search Engines'
- Next to the heading for the 'Other search engines', click the 'ADD' button
- Name your new entry in the 'Search engine' field (whatever makes sense to you): Battlestar Orion Quickjump
- Put the text you want to trigger it with when typing in the address bar into the 'Keyword' field: bso
- Put the URL you want the browser to execute when you press enter into the 'URL with %s in place of query' field: http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/%s
Note! You don't have to use this feature with search urls. You can use it with any url, since all this feature does is substitute what you 'search' for into the %s. We are using this behavior to exploit how wiki urls are generated and laid out on wikidot. Do not be concerned about spaces in your 'search' since it will replace them with proper symbols for you. The nuts and bolts of it are that chrome replaces spaces with '%20's as is a web standard, and then wikidot detects these and replaces them with hyphens when it routes you to the right place.
Battlestar Orion Search
You should follow the same directions as in the Setup section above. The only thing you do differently is you need a unique keyword (I use 'bsos' which stands for Battlestar Orion Search) and your url will be http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/search:site/q/%s.
Other Custom Searches
How did I find this out for the Battlestar Orion wiki? I went to the wiki and searched for something I would be able to easily identify in the url after the results came up (say 'lulz'). On the resulting search page, the search url is the one up in the address bar, and the place you want to put your %s is wherever you see the term you searched for. So in this case, http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/search:site/q/lulz became http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/search:site/q/%s. You can use this technique for many different sites. Not just wikis.
Usage
After pressing the 'Add' button, you are now ready to use your 'bso' shortcut!
- Alt+Tab to your Chrome window
- Ctrl+T to open a new tab, Ctrl+N for a new window, or Ctrl+L to highlight the address bar of the current page (user preference)
- Type 'bso' then spacebar
- Type the page you want to go to 'the leap' then enter
Your browser should have taken you to http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/the-leap!
Get More Out of 'bso'
Once you start using this, you'll notice that some of our urls for pages on the wiki are not quite friendly to this technique. For example, say you want to get to the main chargen page we have setup. Well that's setup as '…/chargen-faq' meaning you'd have to type 'chargen faq' to get there. If you're lazy like me? This isn't good enough. What if I want to just type 'cg' or 'chargen'?
I've got you covered. I've started setting up pages in our wiki that redirect to the right page, so when you go to http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/cg it will immediately show you http://battlestarorion.wikidot.com/chargen-faq.
I'm not going to document them all here, because really they shouldn't be something you learn. They should be something that is instinctual to the average person, so if there's one you think should exist, send in a +request on game (+request Wiki Redirect=I think 'colonies' should go to 'twelve-colonies' page.).
It's easy to setup these redirects yourself if you have the power to create new pages, but we'd like to avoid redirects like 'sam' to 'samtara' because remember these will be global for the site and they will also show up in wiki searches which is why we're handling them through +requests.