How to turn myfav.es into a personal one-click-update social hub

Big Picture

I'm pretty obsessed with streamlining things for maximum efficiency.  As a confirmed ADD kid, I've learned that the less shiny stuff I keep around to distract me, the better off I am.  Minimalism is key for me.  Something I've run across and have been using lately along these lines it the Myfav.es start page.  I love the design and the simplicity of this service, and I adore the way it looks:
 

Update your social sites with one click

I decided to see if I could extend the functionality for myself a little bit - I realized that instead of simply bookmarking custom URLs you can also create bookmarks using the html "mailto" command, which opens a new email to a given address. For instance, "mailto:Trevor@convozine.com" would open up a new email to that address in my default email application.

The reason this is useful is that many social sites support posting via email, either natively, or through the use of various third party services. I can, for instance, update my Facebook or Twitter status this way without logging in. I just click the myfav.es link and shoot off an email.

How-to

Navigate to myfav.es and mouseover the 'customize' link in the bottom right corner (hidden by default).  Then hit up the 'my sites' tab and choose the bookmarks you want to start with by dragging them from the library on the left to the shelf on the right. By default, these link to the actual sites, but we will change that in the next step.

Once you've got the icons you want to work with, make sure to check out the options tab for some further tweaks to customize your page. After that, head back to the main page by saving your settings.

To implement the 'mailto' part of this, mouse over the bottom right of the icon you want to launch your email and click customize.

Then change the URL to the proper 'mailto' link.  If you want to use this to update a service via email, you will likely have a custom email address where you send the email. Enter that here using the "mailto:theaddress@thedomain" format.

I'm also using this to have one-click shortcuts to a few people I email regularly, as well as a shortcut to my own address because I commonly send emails to myself of things I want to remember.

Set your default email client

The one rub you may run into if you use a web-based mail client like Gmail is that you need to set it as your default email client so that clicking a mailto url doesn't launch your desktop email client.

The solution I found for gmail was to install the Google Notifier application. Among other things, it lets you set Gmail as your default browser. Now when I click a mailto link, an email draft opens in a new browser tab.

Install the notifier and open up the preferences to set gmail as the default. You can disable all the other options so that you aren't getting popups in your task bar every time you get new mail.


Going Further

The mailto syntax supports all sorts of things, such as the ability to define subject line and body text in the new email you open.  A lot of services that allow for email updates support tags or keywords which change how the email is interpreted.  You can type up a 'cheat sheet' of what options are supported and have that appear in the body of the new email you open up so you always have it for reference.

The syntax for adding body text is "mailto:Address@Domain?body=Body Text Goes Here "

If you use email as a personal database like I do, you could even have icons which start emails with certain keywords in the subject line and then use Gmail to filter those into the appropriate inbox. For instance, you could set up a filter in Gmail to put all incoming emails from yourself that contain the string "Article Ideas" in the subject line into a separate mailbox and to apply the label "Ideas" to them.

There are other things you can do with the mailto command as well, check out this link for more info.

 

A Caveat

Myfav.es uses cookies to store the setting to your custom site, not a secure login. This means that potentially anyone with physical access to your machine could post to your services without knowing your login info.  This is probably not a huge consideration if you aren't sharing your machine with other people, but it is something to be aware of.  Incidentally, this also means that your start page won't be accessible on other machines.  However, the myfav.es guys say that user accounts are coming soon, so that should solve these issues handily.