Friday, January 29, 2010

URL Hacks!

Hey, so I'm posting these here as much for my benefit as for the benefit of anyone else, but check it out! I've been getting more interested in URL hacks for various purposes as I happened across them from time to time, and know enough now that I want to drop them all in one place. A big hat tip to Lifehacker, as well as to others who linked me to some of these too long ago for me to remember specifically who.

Download Youtube Videos:

- prepend "youtube" in any URL for a youtube video with "kick" or "pwn" as in "http://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=NP4mgObDeUU"

- switch out the "Y" in "Youtube" with a "3".

These 3 hacks all achieve the same thing, namely an opportunity to download any youtube video. Rad! Check them out, they each have their ups and downs, different formats available, and other features.


Use the goo.gl URL shortener without installing anything:

Go here, and just drag that bookmarklet up to your browser's toolbar. Once it's there, just hit it any time to get a goo.gl URL for wherever you are at that moment. Trust me, it's a URL hack, it's just tucked into this bookmarklet (maybe I should do one of these on bookmarklets!)

Grab and edit screen caps of websites:

- Just add "aviary.com/" in front of any URL

This one is especially new to me, and especially awesome, especially if you're into sharing stuff on the internet, especially. It pulls down the image and imports it into Aviary's totally excellent editing software, all in the cloud, so you can get exactly the image you want by the time you get to the downloading stage. FN RAD.

Break the Paywall:

-
This one is a little more finicky than the others, but works for viewing articles at WSJ, Financial Times, and other sites with stank-ass paywalls. I'll just link you to Digital Inspiration because they've gone to the trouble of embedding a bunch of youtube videos that show you how, and I don't want to.
- In most cases you can just search the title of the article you want and view it through google's cache.

Search Google Images by Color:

-
Append "&imgcolor=colorname" to the URL of your completed google image search, switching "colorname" with the color of your choice of course. Works like a charm.

T
hat's it for now, but there's a ton of more nichelike, specific URL hacks out there if you're into looking for them. If I run across any more worthy of a mention here, I'll come back and edit the post.