I set up my website around 2002-2003. At that time, I was using the first generation iMac, which has 32 MB RAM, and 4 GB hard drive, and a fancy 15 inch CRT monitor with 800 x 600 resolution. I designed my website with the technical restraints of that period, and the site is quite minimalistic, which fits both my personal aesthetics and the technological limits.
Now, both my PC and Mac has more than 1 GB RAM, and the hard drives routinely exceed 100 GB. However, I see few reasons to change my site’s overall appearance, since I am quite a minimalist, and the austere interface suits me so well. For that reason, I did not change my HTML pages for a long time.
Ever since I start to use Wikipedia regularly, I start to love the keyboard shortcuts of the site. Especially the Alt-F (Control-F on a Mac) keyboard shortcut to put the input focus into the search box. It would be nice to have a similar shortcut for my blog.
So I look into the source code. I learned the usage of accesskey attribute of HTML. It can be used inside a link or a text box form. Someone wrote a quite good introduction on how to use keyboard shortcuts within web pages.
So, today, I added the following keyboard shortcuts to my home page. To access the keyboard shortcuts, use Alt key on a Windows computer, and Control key on a Mac. If you use Internet Explorer, you must hit Enter to go to the link, but you don’t need to if you are using other web browsers, including Google Chrome. One reason I use Chrome, so that I can save my “Enter” key on my keyboard,
b: My English blog
c: My Chinese homepage
a: My bookmark page (quite old, has only historical and nostalgic value)
inside my Chinese homepage:
e: My English homepage
m: My Chinese blog
a: My bookmark page (the same as in the English page)
In my English blog page:
h: Go back to my Homepage
b: Refresh the blog page
f: Put keyboard focus to the Search box, just like the Wikipedia page
In my Chinese blog page:
h: Go back to my Chinese homepage
m: Refresh the Chinese blog page
f: Search my blog, just like Wikipedia search box
Another interesting fact, since I use frame in my home pages, I must use the following tag to set my keyboard focus first:
<body onLoad="self.focus()">
