ShortcutGuide Blog

Visual keyboard back online

mike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 23:56:38 +0000

Today I received an e-mail request to have the visual keyboard put back online (all the while I thought people were enjoying the textual list of shortcuts). Due to the request, there’s a link on every shortcut page to see the shortcuts on the “original” flash interface.

Please continue to send in any requests you may have. Thanks.

Over 250 Applications Today

mike — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:24:37 +0000

Video Tutorial Keyboard Shortcuts

mike — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 16:57:27 +0000

I was searching on YouTube and saw a surprising amount of keyboard shortcut tutorials. Several individuals and some websites (LifeHacker) are starting to create tutorials for keyboard shortcuts (e.g., Google Reader). One possible consideration is to integrate these with the ShortcutGuide website.

This is a rather humourous spoof of an infomercial for keyboard shortcuts

ShortcutGuide milestones: 10K+ keyboard shortcuts, 20K pageviews per month

mike — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:51:53 +0000

It’s been roughly 1.5 years since ShortcutGuide.com opened up shop on the web. During the last few months I’ve been gearing up and putting out more features, trying to spread the good word (or key, for those that enjoy a mediocre pun). I think some of this work has been paying off. ShortcutGuide.com reached a couple milestones today 1) over 10,000+ keyboard shortcuts on the site (over 245 apps) 2) 20,000+ pageviews for the month ending July 24th. I hope to bring you many much more news in the coming months. The last milestone was the 200 apps mark earlier this month.

Quickly find the right version keyboard shortcuts

mike — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:03:33 +0000

Sometimes when searching for keyboard shortcuts you’ll find the wrong version of the keyboard shortcuts for the application you’re looking for (e.g., you have Microsoft Access 2007, and you search for Microsoft Access keyboard shortcuts and the result page has shortcuts for Microsoft Access 2002). If you land on a shortcutguide.com you’ll see a set of links for the correct version you’re looking for.

ShortcutGuide Keyboard Shortcuts in 23 Languages!

mike — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:45:22 +0000

You can now read keyboard shortcuts on ShortcutGuide in 23 other languages besides English:

Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish

The functionality comes from the Google Translate widget (thanks Google). Try the World of Warcraft example below.

You can’t always be right

mike — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:24:15 +0000

Yesterday I wrote a post boasting about how many votes were cast on the new rating system. While the post was technically accurate, a large amount of those votes were actually made by the googlebot. During the excitement of setting up the rating system, I forgot to block the voting script page (in the robots.txt file) from the googlebot; meaning it traversed the links and that counted as a vote. Hope this helps to provide some useful information for those considering implemented ranking systems. I’ll file this into the lessons learned archive.

Note: I stumbled onto this by accident while reviewing access logs from the site.

Faster page loads and URLs

mike — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:07:20 +0000

Pages that link from the autocomplete UI should load much faster now. Pages that are loaded are static, however, updates (additional shortcuts) are updated every hour; votes made by users count, however, new tallies are only refreshed every hour as well.

Application URLs now appear in this format: company/application/version#.#/keyboard-shortcuts/

There’s a link on each page to sell all the shortcuts from that publisher as well.

Easier to read keyboard shortcuts

mike — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:00:24 +0000

I’ve made a small style change to how shortcut keys are represented, they should be much easier to read now.

Users are a fan of ratings, who knew?

mike — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:10:26 +0000

I announced about a week ago the new rating system for shortcuts. During the past week over 5900+ votes have been cast. Shortly (no pun intended), the site will feature a page that has the top 20 most voted applications.