Creative Web Development - CSS, XHTML, Javascript and RTML for Yahoo Store

Life, The Windows Address Bar, and Everything

It's been a hectic few weeks. Unfortunately, that means the blogging fun is on temporary hiatus, which means I'll only be able to update it at completely random times, sometimes 3 days in a row, sometimes not for 3 weeks. For my 7 loyal fans (I wish) I'll try to update as often as I can.

I got my first migraine of the busy season last week...and it didn't seem related to work at all. In fact, it was perfectly timed with Sophie (our only female ferret, and a complete daddy's girl) going into a very scary seizure. Krissy was on the ball and got her some Karo syrup and brought her back...and as she recovered, the migraine went away...it was strange to say the least. A lot of strange coincidences like that have been happening lately...enough to freak me out a bit.

As far as work goes, released the RTML Toolbar v1.0 (alpha) this week. It's basically a set of macros and keyboard shortcuts that helps to write RTML templates locally, as text, and then upload them. Sunil is already using it, so far he says it's worked well. Hopefully this can help with productivity at the office, because there's a LOT of people who want work this time of year, and we want to be able to accomodate them all.

The reason I found time to write all this is because I'm locked out of the store I'm working on (are they publishing at 4:20am? who else is up at this hour?). But, it looks like I'm back in, so back to the grind. In the meantime, here's a tip so I don't feel like I just wasted 10 minutes of your life.

Using the Windows Address Bar as a clipboard and Run box

I love visual clipboards, but have a hard time finding places where I remember to use them. In Firefox, I constantly paste Store IDs into the upper-right corner search box so I can always easily access them as I work. In IE I do the same with the Google Toolbar. In Slimbrowser (IE with Tabbed browsing, which I use for Autotask because it is popup-based) there's a search box as well.

But what if I'm not in a web browser, or want a clipboard that is global across all programs? Using Ctrl+C isn't safe, because you're likely to overwrite that (often!), and installing 3rd party software is a pain and weighs down the system. Instead, you can turn on the Address Bar in the Windows Taskbar. It's simple to do, just right-click the taskbar, go to Toolbars, and choose Address. Its real function is like a Run dialog (with Auto-Fill), allowing you access to your common folders quickly. In the screenshot below, you can see how it saves the folders you've accessed recently. However, I use it as a temporary dump for text. As long as you don't press Enter or Go, you can paste text in here and it will stay there until you reboot (or crash, heh). When you click it into focus, it auto-selects all, so you can just Ctrl+C it back into your clipboard. I use this all the time now for Store ID, so I can easily go between Favelets in different browsers with this string. I keep mine short even though I have multiple monitors because I rarely need to see what I'm copying and pasting there. If you want to get crazy with it or don't have a wide screen, you can make your taskbar two levels high, so the Address bar stretches the entire width of the screen. Then you can have as much text pasted there as you want (hit the spacebar about 6 times between each set) which you can access all you want.

Tags

Internet, Yahoo Store, Windows, Taskbar, Windows Taskbar, Address Bar, Shortcuts, Efficiency,

posted by steve at 4:13 AM