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Remove tracking data from copied URLs

A while back, my friend James and I were discussing the amount of tracking cruft in many URLs. In my case, I subscribe to a ton of email newsletters, and I noticed that those URLs are just laden with tracking information—and most go through a URL processor, so you don't really see those tracking details until you've clicked the link, at which point it's too late to avoid any tracking.

I wanted a way to clean up these URLs such that the least-possible tracking information was sent to a server—and in particular, to prevent any browser cookie creation. In addition, if I want to share a link with friends, I don't want to send them a crufty tracker-laden link—I wanted a nice clean shareable URL.

Note: I wrote all of this before I knew about Jeff Johnson's Link Unshortener, which does all of this (and more) in a "real" app. If you'd like the easy solution, Jeff's app is the way to go. Mine is definitely a do-it-yourself concoction that's not for the faint of heart.

tl;dr version: Install this macro group (v8.3) in Keyboard Maestro to remove tracking details from copied URLs in a set of defined apps.

Latest Update: Apr 11 2022 Fixed a bug related to custom domains, added aliexpress as a decrufting URL, and updated the in-app help boxes.

Going forward, all future updates to this macro will be found in this post on the Keyboard Maestro forums.

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Open URLs in either frontmost or default browser

Between Many Tricks and this blog, I spend a lot of time in browsers. Most of the time, I use Safari, but I do occasionally work in Chrome and Firefox, too—most often to check how a page looks or functions.

I keep my "permanent" bookmarks in Safari, and don't presently use any sort of cross-browser sync. (I used to use one, but had a lot of trouble with duplicates, so I stopped.)

I wanted a way to open a limited number of URLs in either Safari (if that's what I was in, or if I wasn't in a browser), or in the frontmost browser, if that browser were frontmost. I could just create the subset as bookmarks in each browser, but if I wanted to add or remove a page from the list, I'd have to do so multiple times.

In the end, I came up with a set of Keyboard Maestro macros that do exactly what I want. I access my short list of multi-browser URLs via Keyboard Maestro's pop-up palette, as seen at right.

This appears when I press ⌃1; after that, a single digit opens the desired URL. But how does it know whether to open the URL in Safari or one of the other browsers? It takes one helper macro, then one macro for each URL that I want to open in this manner.

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Count characters in Keyboard Maestro inputs via filters

Yesterday, I added an SSL certificate to my site, and posted a brief note about the change. In that post, I included an image…which turned out to be, well, the comments say it all:

Yes, I posted a non-https image in the 'site is secure' post. Sigh.

So I took Jonathan's comment to heart, and created a Keyboard Maestro macro that ensures I post only relative URLs from now on.

Generally, I don't think such a thing would be worth sharing, as it's just a basic text replacement macro, right?. Mostly right, but in this case, I learned about a Keyboard Maestro feature that may be useful to others. So share I will…

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