Firefox aliases with substitution strings

This is possibly really well known, but I haven’t seen it mentioned often, and I’ve forgotten how I learnt it.

So I thought other might perhaps benefit from this.

First of all, you might know that if you right-click on a bookmark in the Bookmarks menu, you can bring up Properties in a window.

The Keyword field there will allow you to go to that bookmark by writing this keyword in the address bar. (That is, if you’ve made “widmann” the keyword for the bookmark for this blog, you can just type “widmann” in the address bar instead of “blog.widmann.org.uk”.)

The interesting feature here is that you can use ‘%s’ in the Location field, and this is then replaced by whatever you write after the keyword.

That is, if you have created a bookmark and set the location to “http://ordnet.dk/ods/search?keyword=%s” and the keyword to “ods”, you can type “ods blog” in the address bar and this automagically expands to “http://ordnet.dk/ods/search?keyword=blog”.

This can be really useful for dictionary-like sites such as Wikipedia.