Timothy in Ohio sent us this detailed tip showing how he organizes his abbreviations into contexts:
I find that using different beginning delimiters for different contexts helps me to remember which ones they are.
1) For HTML shortcuts, I start with “<". For example:
<3 = <h3>%|</h3>
<i = <img xsrc="%|" mce_src="%|" alt="" width="x" height="y" />
<xstrict = XHTML Strict DocType and <head> stuff (see below)
<bq = blockquote
2) For IRC (administrative commands), I start with "i" such as ikick or iban to fill in a kick or ban syntax, or /login to fill in the login stuff
3) For chat shortcuts I start with "!", eg. !yw (you're welcome) or !ty (Thank you!) or !bbin (I'll be be back in %| minutes)
4) Email I start with "/" or "@" (I don't know why):
/sig for my signature, /wsig for my work signature
/add is my mailing address
/phone fills in all my phone numbers:
work
home
cell
in that order because if I put my number in something I may want to give all my numbers, but I might not. If I want to just do 2, I use /phone and then just do shift + up-arrow to highlight and delete the cell, etc
/yiwbt = Yes I will be there (I get a lot of "Can you come to the meeting?" or "Will you be at the meeting?", etc).
Then I also have some of what I like to call "recursive" shortcuts which involve two shortcuts:
1) I have shortcuts for each day of the week @mon @tue @wed etc which expand to "Monday at "
2) I have another shortcut @remind: "Just a reminder we will be
meeting " and then I add @mon or @tue and then add the time too
I prefer the phone to email, but sometimes you need to email someone and ask them to call you back when it's convenient for them, so I have some shortcuts for that too:
@church = "Give me a call at the church when you get a chance - 740-446-1030"
Similar for @cell and @home
And then of course there are the dang typos that I make and now get autocorrected not just in word processing apps, but all apps:
nad = and
teh = the
god = God
And there are times that I want to have the real fractions rather than just 1/2 or 3/4. I could make a shortcut of "1/2" but then I can't type a literal "1/2" so what to do?
I use two // instead of 1, for example: I use a shortcut of 1//2 for ½
I think those are all my tips!
Oh here is <xstrict expanded (yeah I write HTML by hand, sick, I know)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>%|</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
Thanks, Timothy, for the good ideas.
