Safari 4 top sites home page shortcut & manually edit top sites

Posted on 10. Jun, 2009 by john in Everything, Technology

POST UPDATE as of July 2, 2009... Nick Bailey posted a comment below pointing out that you can simply put “topsites:” (no quotes) for the Home page in the Safari 4 preferences and now the Top Sites page will be the home page! Thanks Nick!

— Original Post Below —

I am beginning to really like Safari 4.
MacMost with Gary Rosenzweig has a podcast that I subscribe to and today he talked about some new features in Safari 4.

The feature I am most excited about is the ability to edit your top sites page manually (not relying on the “I visit this site a lot” concept). There’s nothing wrong with this concept, but I want to be able to setup my top sites page (or at least some of it) and have it stay that way… I suppose I’m just a control freak, or OCD.

Here’s how to do it…

Open the Top Sites page in edit mode.
Open a new Safari window and go to the site you want to add.
Drag the url from the address bar (by the little icon at the beginning of the url) into the Top Sites page.
Whalla! It is added and pinned automatically.

I assume these same steps will work for the Windows version, but I haven’t tried it.

Also, I removed my home page and set the new page and new tab options to Top Sites. But then I got to missing the ability to hit  [command]+shift+H to bring up my homepage (which I was hoping I could set to Top Sites).

Hmm, how to overcome this little annoyance for a keyboard shortcut junkie?

Well, here is how to get this shortcut set to Top Sites…

Open System Preferences.
Go to Keyboard and Mouse.
Keyboard Shortcuts.
Hit the + button.
Choose Safari for the application.
For “Menu Title” enter [Show Top Sites].
Make the shortcut key  [command]+shift+H.
Done!

Note that this will set the  [command]+shift+H shortcut to Top Sites regardless if your Home Page is set to anything or not.

Again, if you are interested in more tips like this I’d suggest macmost.com … sign up for his free Video Podcast and the Mac Answers podcast, they are both informative for the everyday mac user.

Tags: shortcuts

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8 Responses to “Safari 4 top sites home page shortcut & manually edit top sites”

Jason K.

17. Oct, 2009

thanks this was exactly what i was looking for.. I kinda knew you could make a custom keyboard shortcut for it, but its good to have a reference =D.

Reply to this comment
- johncolumbo
  
  18. Oct, 2009
  
  You're welcome Jason, I'm glad it helped
  
  Reply to this comment
johncolumbo

02. Jul, 2009

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Reply to this comment
Nick Bailey

02. Jul, 2009

Solution found:

If you’d like Safari 4 Beta’s Top Sites screen to be your default home page, here’s all you need to do. Open Safari 4’s Preferences, and choose the General tab. In the Home Page box, enter topsites:, then close Preferences.

Note that the code is
topsites:
with the colon

Reply to this comment
- johncolumbo
  
  02. Jul, 2009
  
  Nick!
  
  THANKS for finding that!
  I totally deleted the shortcut key I created above and did what you said and now Top Sites is my home page.
  
  AWESOME!
  
  Thank you very much for letting me (and others) know. I've edited the post to make your (clearly awesome) find known.
  
  Reply to this comment
Nick Bailey

02. Jul, 2009

I agree! I’m also begging to like Safari 4 on my mac after a long time devoted to Firefox. But why did they not think to let us set the home page to top sites?! It’s just typical of Apple – make some really neat features and then prevent you from using them in just the way you wanted.

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Trackbacks/Pingbacks

John Columbo III - 21. Sep, 2009
RT @tweetmeme Safari 4… top sites home page shortcut and manually editing top sites : Christ, Music and Technology… http://bit.ly/4nQc0
John Columbo III - 10. Jun, 2009
New blog post: Safari 4… top sites home page shortcut and manually editing top sites http://bit.ly/4nQc0

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