Sometimes it’s the simplest tool that can be the most useful. There are 3 bookmarklets that are essential, easy-to-use additions for your web browser. And what’s great is that they’ll work with just about any browser on any platform.
The first is for bit.ly, a web address shortening service that makes it much easier to share long and perhaps convoluted addresses over email, instant message, or even in conversation. The second is for Delicious, a social bookmarking service that allows you to save, categorize, and share links to specific pages on the Web. And the third is for Readability, a very cool way to make otherwise cluttered or poorly designed web pages into much more readable (get it?) documents.
The bookmarklets will sit in the bookmark toolbar of your web browser until you need them, at which point you simply click on them to make them do their helpful little functions for you.
I’ll show you what I’m talking about in what follows.
Let’s say you’re reading a story from the New York Times website…
You decide that you want to share this story with someone else, but the web address is
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magazine/15lives-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine,
which doesn’t exactly come rolling off the tongue.
By using your bit.ly bookmarklet, you can shorten the web address, making it much easier to share. You can even create a custom shortened address like http://bit.ly/OnlyDisconnect.
What if you want to save a link to that story so that you can come back to it later or so that you can share it with friends who are part of your social bookmarking community? Use your Delicious bookmarklet to save a new bookmark of the story…
And finally, what if you want a nice, printed copy of the story or you want to make it easier to read onscreen. Use your Readability bookmarklet to get rid of all the distracting clutter and improve the typography…
Want to learn more?
- bit.ly: Read the “About” page (or jump straight to the “Tools” page to get your bookmarklet.
- Delicious: Read the “About” page or watch this video by CommonCraft.
- Readability: Get started by following these directions or read what David Pogue has to say about it.
Do you have your own favorite bookmarklets? If so, tell us about them in the comments.
15 Comments
I’ve got all of those in my bookmarks bar (well, I’m old-school enough to still have tinyURL instead of bit.ly). Good calls, all!
The only bookmarklet I’d add isquietube, which is sort of like Readability for videos.
The other bookmarklet that I can’t live without is–surprise, surprise–Read It Later. I use the Firefox extension most of the time, but when I’m on Safari or Chrome, I use the bookmarklet.
RIL is awesome. I am a big fan of the Firefox extension. The check-mark function is perfect for quick bookmarking (and dismissing when you finally read it later).
The Google Reader subscribe bookmarklet…
I use the “share on Facebook” and “star on Google reader” bookmarklets quite often.
But obviously the most important bookmarklet of all is Kittenify, which replaces all the images on a page with pictures of kittens.
The Diigo bookmarklet is superior to delicious. Diigo overall is a superior social bookmarking tool.
I prefer Delicious, myself, but I’m open to being persuaded otherwise. Why do you prefer Diigo?
Seconding Delicious and Read It Later. I’d also add PrintWhatYouLike, which lets you format your own printer-friendly version of a page and strip out all the images, excess space, and chunks of text you don’t want. It’s a lifesaver when you want to print part of a frame-based page.
I’ll third del.icio.us and Read It Later. I also have Zotero built into my Firefox browser.
Just want to point out that you should use the full url for a link you’re putting in a Web page. It’ll make maintenance easier.
Sorry, should have included this. We Fryer points out in this post, some schools (and countries) block url shorteners. If you’ve used it for a Web site (or in a presentation you’re about to give) some people may not be able to access links.
The bookmarklet I use regularly is JavaScript Shell, which is very useful for ad hoc scripting. It’s not nearly as fancy as Firebug, but sometimes a little window where you can type JavaScript expressions is just what you need. If you’re That sort of Bear, obviously.
Apart from the TinyURL and Delicious ones, I regularly use a Bloglines bookmarklet to quickly subscribe to feeds. Also some Wordpress bookmarklets for adding sites to my blogroll and creating a post with a link to the page I’m viewing.
I also have a Wayback Machine bookmarklet that is useful from time to time to see the earlier versions of a page or of a page/site that has been removed.
Diigo is the most powerful research tool I use.
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