Our Users Are So Smart: Search BatchBook Contacts via The FireFox Awesome Bar

• Posted May 4th, 2009
• By Adam Darowski (bio)
• Filed under: Our Users are So Smart, Using BatchBook

I love getting neat BatchBook usage tips from our users. This happened again over the weekend as Andrew shared with us (via the BatchBook Forums) how he’s using FireFox 3′s “Awesome Bar” to quickly search for contacts in BatchBook.

Now that I have all my data in BatchBook, I wanted a quick way to pull up a contact. Thanks to Firefox and the Delicious.com extension, I have it!

(If you don’t know, Delicious.com is a great bookmarking application. It handles all my bookmarks. And there’s a handy Firefox extension.)

Be sure you have the Delicious extension installed. Then you can right click in the BB contact search box (upper right of any BB screen). Select “Add a keyword for this search in Delicious.” Then you can fill out the bookmark details and enter a keyword that will invoke the search.

Now I can search my contacts directly from the Firefox Awesome Bar. I just type “bb smith” and hit enter. Voila!

So, in summary, entering “bb darowski” into the address bar would automatically run a BatchBook search for “darowski” and take you to the results. Nifty! I immediately set this up and found it super useful. I then realized you don’t even need the Delicious extension to set it up.

Here’s how you can set this up for yourself:

Step 1: Right click (or control+click) on the search field in BatchBook. Choose “Add a Keyword for this Search”.

Step 2: Name your search and give it a shortcut (I’m using “bb”).

Step 3: Enter your search string. Entering “bb darowski” searches BatchBook for “darowski”.

Step 4: View your results.

Great tip, Andrew! Thanks for sharing!

Tags: awesome bar, delicious, firefox, Our Users are So Smart, search