Creative Blog
Bookmarklets are simply links which you can add to your browser’s bookmark bar which offer useful functionality for website and apps.
A regular bookmark will simply take you straight to a website, whereas a bookmarklet will provide some kind of functionality, for example: adding a website to Delicious the popular bookmarking web app.
There are some really useful bookmarklets available which can increase your productivity, especially when researching. Here is a collection of some of the ones I use frequently, hope you find them useful.
Delicious
One of the first bookmarklet’s I ever used was from Delicious. If you use Delicious, you probably already know about this.
The bookmarklet simply pops-up a dialogue window allowing you to add a webpage link to your Delicious collection, with the option to attach tags and notes. Simple stuff, very useful.
http://delicious.com/help/tools
Readability
Before Apple introduced the Reader function on Safari 5, the Readability bookmarklet was already doing pretty much the exact same thing.
If you find a webpage which is particularly difficult to read, for example the text may be too high-contrast, or simply to small to read comfortably, you can click the Readability bookmarklet which will instantly provide you with a simple white background with the text presented in a nicely formatted way.
There are some useful options for you to custom configure the bookmarklet to suit your needs, such as text size, margin options, and overall style. I can imagine this could be a real lifesaver for people who have problems with their sight.
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Quix
Quix the most advanced bookmarklet around. Essentially, you can use it for anything. Once you have added the main Quix bookmarklet to your browser, you can quickly access a range of seriously useful commands such as searching Flickr or Google Images, tweeting something, and even shortening a url.
The list of commands is really impressive http://quixapp.com/help/ but it doesn’t stop there. You can extend Quix and create you own commands! The syntax is really easy to understand and once you have created your own commands, you can create a tailored bookmarklet which will enable you to run your own custom syntax. Very clever stuff, hats-off to Joost de Valk for his time in creating something truly unique and useful.
XRAY
This bookmarklet is really useful for web developers. When you click the bookmarklet a dialogue window pops-up and enables you to click any element on the page you are looking at to reveal details such as; inheritance hierarchy, pixel dimensions, box model, and css declarations.
XRAY currently works in all modern browsers as well as the dreaded IE6 and all subsequent versions of IE.
Lasso
The Lasso is a bookmarklet for adding images and website links to Zootool which is an amazing free web application for collecting inspiration in the form of images and links.
I won’t go into to much detail about Zootool as I have a more in-depth look at the service planned for an upcoming post. If you are not familiar with the app, I recommend you check it out – it’s very cool and beautifully designed.
The Lasso enables you to choose an image form any webpage and add it to your Zoo. This is certainly the most sexy looking bookmarklet I have discovered in terms of the presentation and ease-of-use.
Print Friendly
This bookmarklet service is really neat for people who regularly print stuff from the web. It provides several options for sending a formatted page to your printer or creating and saving a PDF. You can also email and tweet web content quickly.
It is nicely presented and offers options to remove certain elements you may not need in your final document, in an effort to promote saving paper usage.
Sharing web content on Facebook is something most of us do regularly. This bookmarklet enables you to share something you’ve found quickly. Facebook gives you options to choose which image is associated with your shared link.
http://www.facebook.com/tools/
Instapaper
Instapaper is another highly useful service which allows you too save web pages for reading later on. Personally, this has become especially useful for logging interesting content found within tweets. Lots of Twitter and RSS apps have Instapaper integrated. Twitteriffic’s implementation works especially well.
The Read Later bookmarklet works fast and seamlessly sends the link straight to your Instapaper account for reading at a later date.
Bonus: iPhone Bookmarklets
The page linked below has some neat bookmarklets for Safari on the iPhone. Visit the page on your iPhone to find a plethora of really useful functions, such as; Find in Page, Find Next, Find Similar, Language Translations, Duplicate page. The Find on Page bookmarklet is a by far my favourite here, enabling you to search for a word or phrase within a webpage. This functionality really should be a standard feature in iOS.
http://ipuhelin.com/en/safariplus/
Pastlet is also worth a look, allowing you to set-up a custom bookmarklet to paste reusable info into forms etc. http://mobilemind.net/
Share this post…
If you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a comment and hit the Tweet and Like buttons at the top – many thanks :)
