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Bit.ly is super simple for shortening links (especially using their bookmarklet). But if you’re like me, you hardly leave your keyboard so it might be really helpful to shorten the link from the location bar itself. Lately, I’ve been using a very simple hack to do exactly that.

Most modern browsers support adding keywords for searching right from the location bar. For example, in Firefox you can bookmark a page and assign a shortcut key:

Notice that I’ve assigned “bitly” as the keyword. Also notice that I’ve changed the Location field to include “%s” which is what the browser uses to substitute your search term (which is everything you type right after the keyword). Now let’s use it just as you would a search engine from the location bar:

Voila! The browser simply substitutes the link for the value of %s and forwards to bitly to shorten it. This isn’t limited to working with bitly only, it should work with any link shortening service. In fact, this hack can be used for any service that expects a link (e.g. posting to reddit, digg, twitter, etc.). By all means, share any other clever uses for this hack in the comments.