As a developer I’m constantly working with different commands, and urls, that become laborious to repeat over, and over again. Nothing new here, in bash we’d write a symbolic link or alias to shorten these everyday suck-holes. What about obnoxiously long and dynamic subdomain urls? This happens most commonly with versioning software (like git).

For instance the url: http://FOO-123.dev.foo.com would reflect the dev branch FOO-123, on the TLD foo.com. The only dynamic part of this url is the integer (123) – so you won’t get any help from auto completing browsers, because the leading FOO- is static across all branches.
For my own productivity I created a js bookmarklet that (when clicked) prompts the user for a numeric branch number, then inserts that into the extremely long/ugly url. Effectively shortening the 26+ characters of typing to something like 3-4 (depending on the size of your dev process maybe less).
Likewise you could highlight something on a page, say a number on a jira ticket, and onclick the bookmarklet will automatically receive said highlighted number and post it to the url.
The below code is configured for this blog post, so reconfigure however you see fit. Hit me up directly, kisses!
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javascript:(function(){var chyeaa = ''; if (window.getSelection) { chyeaa = window.getSelection(); } else if (document.getSelection) { chyeaa = document.getSelection(); } else if (document.selection) { chyeaa = document.selection.createRange().text; } if (chyeaa == '') {chyeaa = prompt('branch #?');}if ((chyeaa != '') && (chyeaa != null)) {window.open('http://FOO-' + chyeaa + '.dev.foo.com');}})(); |