20/20 hindsight is a marvellous thing. One of the biggest mistakes in my life, in retrospect, was taking Latin instead of typing at school. I didn’t see the Internet coming.
I may well remember that all Gaul is divided into three parts (Mr Thompson, I salute you!), but it takes me a long, long time to tell anyone else about it in an email or document.
Luckily TextExpander 
saves my bacon hundreds of times a day. After Quicksilver and MailTags, it is the third biggest time- and finger-saving app on my Mac.
With just a few keystrokes, I can (at lightning speed) dump my mail signatures, frequently-needed URLs, often-typed chunks of HTML code, torturously long institutional titles and much more into almost anything I am typing in Mail.app and elsewhere. (Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame has some actual examples to hand.)
The PR department at SmileOnMyMac kindly emails to tell me about a new ready-made collection of HTML snippets.
When you have imported them, typing “,a” will automatically expand to <a href=""></a>. As you can imagine, this kind of thing saves bucketloads of time every day.
You can get hold of these 60 snippets either by themselves or rolled into an earlier collection of 100+ common typos that TextExpander can recognise and correct on the fly.
TextExpander is not the only way to do this nor the cheapest (shareware — USD 29.95) but for ease of use — res ipsa loquitur!
The makers of 
TextExpander, the utility formerly known as 
I was surprised today by the reception that greeted 
Peter Maurer’s text snippet manager, 
Some time ago, 
