If you use Chrome, Trello, or a huge assortment of other technology products, this an excellent method for quickly capturing a single value of information.
This is accomplished by setting up a “custom search engine” through Chrome, and then using the chrome Omnibox to enter the data.
The backend is powered through IFTTT (“If This, Then That”). It works through IFTTT’s API Trigger, which then passes that data value along to the app of your choosing.
In one of my favorite use cases, I have “nt” + Spacebar send whatever I type in to Trello instantly.
You set this up by going to Chrome search engine settings:
chrome://settings/searchEngines
Then click the small “Add” button on the right side of the list. This will open a small popup
1. The first box called “Search engine” is the name, so type in “New Trello Task”.
2. Next it asks for “Keyword”, that’s what triggers it, so type in something short and easy to remember, I like “nt” (for ‘new task’).
3. Last it asks for “URL with %s in place of query”, this is where them magic happens, and it’s the trickiest park.
You’ll have to leave that tab up and open www.ifttt.com. Create an account if you don’t have one.
Then navigate to https://ifttt.com/create/if-receive-a-web-request?sid=3 to make an applet with the “Webhook” trigger. Type in the name of the data you want to capture. I’d recommend ‘new_trello_event’, and click next.
Now click “That” to select an action you want IFTTT to do when that trigger event occurs. In this case we’ll use Trello, but it could be a huge number of things.
Set it up something like this:
Then go to this page and click “Documentation”:
https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks
Then you can copy and paste the exact event name into the endpoint generator (the address that you’re sending info to), and then copy everything in the string:
Then you’ll need to append “?value1=” onto the end of the string you just got from IFTTT so that it specifies there’s a value you want to pass along with the webhook, not only that the webhook was triggered.
Now that we have the full string. We can go back to Chrome search engine settings page and paste it into the “Search string” box. All we have to do now is append the whole string with “%s”. That way whatever we type into the omnibox is added as “value1” and sent with the webhook to IFTTT, which then sends it to your action (Trello in this case).
So a complete url into Chrome will look like this:
https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/new_trello_task/with/key/your-key-here?value1=%s
This will allow you to click in the omnibar, type “nt”, press spacebar, type whatever you want in, hit enter, and IFTTT will turn that into a Trello card in a couple seconds! Super valuable tool for really fast logging of tasks so you don’t forget.
I currently use this to set:
– iOS reminders
– Nest temperature
– Create template Google Docs for taking notes at events
As well as the Chrome custom search engine feature for a ton of other workflows, like logging into custom portal urls (www.domain.com/client.com/login) etc.