Bookmarks are a lot more useful when they can be found almost instantaneously, in nearly any context. Opening up a Web page and typing a search string will slow you down, and can distract you from what you're working on. Luckily this problem is easy to solve, since our search can be launched with a simple URL. To that end I've put together a couple of useful techniques for quickly searching through my personal LinkLocker account on both my Mac and on iOS—using a custom search for Alfred, and a custom Drafts action, respectively.
Quick Searches on Mac with Alfred
Alfred 3 is a really handy utility for Mac which allows you to control nearly all aspects of your Mac with your keyboard. The number of things you can do with Alfred is staggering, and I won't bore you with a long laundry list. The Custom Web Search feature allows you to set up your own custom search engines in Alfred, which can be fired with just a couple of keystrokes. Once you've installed it, the LinkLocker custom search will let you search your account in seconds. Just launch Alfred using whatever keystrokes you've chosen (the default is ⌥ + SPACEBAR, but you can change it to whatever you want), type ll and a SPACE, then type the string you want to search for, and hit ENTER. For example, if you activate Alfred and type ll food, your default browser will open to LinkLocker search results for "food.". This is absolutely the quickest way to find your bookmarks on a Mac. To try it out in your copy of Alfred, just install the custom search below:
LinkLocker Custom Search for Alfred
Quick Searches on iOS with Drafts
Quickly finding your links is maybe even more important on iOS, and thankfully it's easy with a custom action for Drafts. Like Alfred, Drafts does a lot of things, and it can be customized extensively for the way you like to work. These customizations allow you to perform predefined actions on snippets of text, and using one of these actions we can quickly launch a LinkLocker search for the text you've entered in Drafts. Just launch Drafts and type your search string, and then run the Search LinkLocker action. This will launch Safari and go right to your search results. To try it, just install the action from the Drafts Action Directory:
Drafts Action: Search LinkLocker
Roll Your Own Quick Search
The search workflows above are handy if you're an Alfred and/or Drafts user, but you can also easily set up your own custom search actions in your productivity tool of choice with a simple URL. Just base your custom integration on this URL pattern:
https://linklocker.co/search?query=[[YOUR SEARCH STRING HERE]]
These methods of quickly finding content will make your links a lot easier to get to, and they really help make using LinkLocker a much more seamless experience. Give them a try and you'll see what I mean.
And if you should happen to make a cool integration or workflow for some other app or service using the above info, please tell us about it on Twitter!