Add Ping to Address Bar in Firefox and Opera

Found this useful tip on how to add a ping shortcut to your Firefox address bar over at Lifehacker. I love its simplicity. Pinging servers is a great way of finding out if they are currently up and running. The time it takes to receive a response is measured in milliseconds and a timeout is returned if it takes to long.

This Firefox tip does not require a plugin, add-on or Greasemonkey script. All you need to do is create a new bookmark of the url: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=%s. Now all that is left to do is to add the keyword ping to the service when you add it as a bookmark.

The keyword command is a way to access an url without typing it. The good thing about is that you can pass parameters. If you want to ping a server you enter ping url in the address bar of Firefox, e.g. ping ghacks.net.

Firefox will recognize the ping keyword and load the url http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=ghacks.net which displays the ping on the website.

You can do the same in Opera. The keywords are named nicknames there but are basically the same. I have not tested it but it should work fine. Let me know if you try that out.