Freeware February: Sogudi

Sogudi is a
Safari add on that has the potential of saving me a large amount of time.
This little freeware gem allows you to type a 'shortcut' instead of an URL in the location field of Safari.

For example, let's say you're a frequent TUAW reader, and you visit the site roughly 50 times a day. Some might ask you why you don't simply bookmark TUAW instead of typing http://apple.weblogsinc.com every time you want to visit the site (a more astute friend would suggest that you at least use the shorter http://www.tuaw.com, but if I mention that it undermines my example). Sogudi allows you to create a shortcut to TUAW so that you need only type TUAW into the location field and boom, TUAW is on your screen.

This alone isn't all that exciting, however the real power of Sogudi is in the fact that you can use variables. In the screen shot you can see I typed in 'wikip Apple Computer.' Wikip is the shortcut for
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that is all the rage now.
Wikipedia URL's are always structured in the same way, much like Google URL's, so Sogudi stores the address as
'http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search=@@@,' where the @@@ is a place holder for  your variable. You just type in wikip followed by a space, which alerts Sogudi that the rest of the text entered is the variable, and the term you want to search for and you're done.

Very cool.