Recently, somebody in the DNS system started serving advertisements to me when I type in simple URLs, like
foo. I used to get failed lookups, which would make Safari try to load
http://www.foo.com, and I think try
http://www.foo.org if that too failed. With the advertisement system, I feel like I'm using a Windows machine -- I have to type the whole thing out. Grr.
Enter
PithHelmet. If you have this shareware add-on for Safari, you can rewrite the URL before it gets requested. This turns out to be even faster than the old way. Here is how to do it:
- Make a new Rule.
- Type the following in the URL field:
^(http://)*([^./]+)(/*)$
This will match any text that lacks a period mark in it, optionally starting with http:// and optionally ending with /.
- Choose "Matching URL request action:" Transmogrify
- Enter the following in the Transmogrification Replacement field:
http://www.$2.com/
I hope this helps some folks out. Other variations could be easily written to alllow replacement for
*.org or
*.edu (by typing, say,
foo o or
foo e in the location bar).