One genius little button that's saving me a whole bunch of time

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How many times do you click on a link to an article, video, image or anything else of interest and want to visit the homepage of that site? It happens to me all the time. Sometimes finding the homepage link is fairly easy, on other occasions it's buried. And then you have to go up to the address bar, delete all of the information before the domain name and hit enter. Well, not any more with the help of this "bookmarklet."

It is the brainchild of Billy Chasen, author of  [anerroroccurredwhileprocessingthisdirective].com (nice and easy url Billy). Billy explains the simplicity behind his idea:

The best ideas come from finding something you do all the time, realize you do it, and then automate it.

With me, I discovered that I frequently go to the base domain of a website by going to the URL, highlighting and deleting the junk on the end of the domain name and then pressing enter. I HATE doing it. I also have to do it when websites don’t link to their home page.

As someone who does a lot of research online for Wisebread, and my job, I'm coming up against this on a daily basis. Countless links lead to websites that I just want to know more about, but I end up having to spend valuable time editing the web address (which doesn't always work either, usually because I delete an extra letter or symbol by mistake).

The "bookmarklet" Billy has devised uses a simple piece of code, that I don't pretend to understand, to get around all of that. To get this simple little button, visit Billy's site here . You'll be greeted with the image below. Simply drag the "go to home" button to your bookmark bar, and hey presto, now you can get to the homepage of any site just by clicking it. 

It's already saved me a bunch of time this evening. And as we all know, time is money.If you have Firefox, you can also try this little add-on that basically navigates you up one level. Enjoy, and thanks Billy.

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Guest's picture
Leo

It's a cool idea, but you'd think websites would have links to their homepages on every page, no? :)

Guest's picture
Mark Rushakoff

If you have the Firefox extension All-in-One Gestures, you can customize a gesture to "Go Up to parent directory/domain".

First it will trim off anything after the last slash, i.e. "http://mail.site.com/username/email5" would go to "http://mail.site.com/username/", then to "http://mail.site.com/". If you do the gesture one more time, it will finally go to "http://site.com".

Guest's picture
Mau

I use the Locationbar extension. It makes the URL in the address bar clickable, so that you can click directly to the root homepage, or any subdomain between there, and the page you start on.

Works pretty well.

Guest's picture
rstlne

K-Meleon has had that feature for a very long time. It has a toolbar button that takes you up one level or to the root of the domain. It's useful whenever I want to trim a link to its bare minimum before posting it to delicious.com.

Guest's picture
Guest

I generally click on the site heading or logo.. works most of the time.
Warren UK