Oct. 10 - The site was mentioned in the New York Times (registration required)
Oct. 7 - Hmmm... apparently access to bookmarklets.com is blocked in China. Here'a a simple bookmarklet that checks this kind of stuff: Is this site accessible in China (IE4+, Netscape 3+, Opera 5+)
which uses the software of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
This bookmarklet (among many other tools) is not available in China, of course.
Aug. 17 - I've reinstalled the "tip jar". Thanks to all of you who have donated in the past! It does help pay the bandwidth bills, which keeps these things free for many people.
Aug. 4 - Oh, this is really good. Yes, really. Hang on.
May 28 - Google Labs has keyboard shortcuts. Here's a bookmarklet that connects you to those keyboard-enabled results: Google (w/shortcuts) (IE 4+ version)
This really does allow the serious searcher to whip through the results.
During the last few years, various corporate identities whose existence depends on previous technologies have tried to hold onto their existence by getting legal restrictions on the kinds of things that people can do with with the information that they are experiencing. This will not work. The world, including the current technology, is vastly more complicated than current organizations can control.
Let the Luddites smash the spinning wheel. Let the scribes object to the printing press. In the long run, none of that matters.
DON'T BLOCK THE FLOW OF DESIRE! The important thing is to assist people in trying to get where they're going. If you try to block that... if you get in the way, you'll be drowned while trying to control the way others drink from the fire hose.
May 27 - Opera 6.02 broke bookmarklets. This has been fixed in Opera 6.03. Ugh... we'll have to detect subversions. (Fortunately it took less than two weeks for them to fix this!)
May 16 - Here's one of the most useful bookmarklets I have: Go Wayback (Explorer 4+ and Netscape 4+)
Trigger it when you run into a 404. As time goes by, there will be increasingly more documents in the past than we have in the present. So the value of a service that solves 404s, such as Wayback (which archives old webpages) will increase.
Another good Wayback bookmarklet: Wayback Undo (Explorer 4+ and Netscape 4+)
which is necessary because once you go into Wayback you stay in Wayback... this allows you to escape to the present.
To push this a bit further, I'll bring up the topic of XMLHTTP (Microsoft's documents and Mozilla's documents).
This allows scripts on a page to request data from other pages, so you can get a bookmarklet like: Wayback Analyze (Explorer 5+ version)
which, if triggered on a result of Go Wayback, will list the sizes of the archived documents. This gives some sense of the overall variation in the page over time. It would be easy to modify this to allow other analyses of the archived pages... allowing searches or summarizations, etc.
The idea of XMLHTTP could be used in other ways. For example, this bookmarklet: Self-Link Titles (Explorer 5+ version)
lists the titles of all pages that link off the current page into the same domain. Again, search and summarization are fairly easy. So you get a way to analyze the "cloud of meaning" around the current page.
Mar. 26 - Ooops! A glitch (accounting error, actually) knocked bookmarklets.com offline for a while. We're back now. For the record, bookmarklets.com has no plans to disappear anytime soon. (Thanks again to those of you who found ways to write or call!)
Jan. 27 - What is this internet thing? Is it a temporary fad? Is it a passing fancy?
Lately we've been distracted by a bad economy and by bad actions, but suppose we could continue forward with ways to meld the available technology with deeper parts of us that haven't been expressed yet. Do we have the courage to explore this?
Suppose we have the technology to convey the deepest sense of what it means to be alive. Are we ready to use this?
Yes!
Jan. 23 - Oh. This is good. Hang on.
2001
Sept. 23 - Two ideas from the "why didn't I think of that before?" department:
1. Aaron Hope writes that the format javascript: (function () { ... })()
eliminates the need for ugly variables (which eliminates safety concerns).
2. JavaScript can assign values to window.name. These values will persist across domains, which provides the secure cross-domain persistence needed by bookmarklets that require within-session persistence (in other words, this can make bookmarklets much more useful).
This works cross-browser (unlike the little-known fact that Netscape allows persistence of properties assigned to the navigator object) although persistence is only within the current window (new windows kill that persistence).
These are two big ideas... probably only interesting to scripters.
In other news: the site has been reviewed by the venerable NetSurfer Digest (Note: major update soon!)
Sept. 21 - The Nimda worm comes at a time when the open exchange of ideas is one of the strongest forces for peace on the planet. It can infect some versions of Internet Explorer if it is used to simply browse a webpage. If you're using Netscape or Internet Explorer 6 you will not be affected. The following bookmarklet aims to detect infection of a page by the Nimda worm:
Nimda Detector. (Explorer 4+ and Netscape 6)
If you trigger this bookmarklet on an ordinary page (i.e. one not discussing Nimda - such as this page) and it indicates possible presence of the worm, you should attempt to contact the webmaster ASAP... the site's server may have been infected and its pages may infect others. Ask the webmaster to look for patches...
Sept. 20 - A bookmarklet which displays the mirror image of an unframed page: Mirror Image (Explorer 4+)
The reason for this is that many cultures (such as the Japanese and Arabic cultures) read in a fashion that is mirror image to that of the West (from right-to-left instead of left-to-right), which influences perception of layout.
Designers need a sense of this; the best designs balance contrasting points of view.
Sept. 19 - Not related to bookmarklets: I made some projects in late 1995 and early 1996 but never bought domain names for them. They were running under the host's domain name but at the end of this month that host will change that name, breaking over 1000 incoming links. I'm moving them to a domain name I own and linking to them from here so the search engines can find them again.
They include the original public domain animated gifs, which spawned some animated smileys. They also include Frames Decoder - a tool to help people make framed webpages - and a way to study contrasting translations from the Chinese.
All these seem quaint now, but all the more reason to remember them.
June 28 - Microsoft's smart tags are a bad idea for a web browser because people rely on author-supplied stylistic emphasis (e.g. blue underlined links) when scanning webpages. Interfering with that by placing third-party text decoration wherever there happens to be a word match will actually make it more difficult for people to comprehend the page (the tags may be "smart", but they'll make people dumber). The effect will be like this bookmarklet:
Insert Dumb Tags (Explorer 5+)
which turns every word into a link to Microsoft. A much much better way to provide the functionality of smart tags is through bookmarklets. If the user wants to get more information about some text it makes more sense to highlight that text and then push a button outside the browsing window, the way we do with search bookmarklets. That way there is no disruption of normal scanning when it is not needed (does anyone really need to be reminded every time they see a company name that they can get a stock quote for that company?) Beyond that, it is easier for third parties to supply their own functionality through bookmarklets than through smart tags; one could even provide something like a customizable version of More Info About.
May 27 - In preparation for Release 2, bookmarklets.com will be moving to a new host during the next day. Hopefully there won't be any bumps!
Mar. 24 - This year I've been obsessed with issues of usability and accessibility. Toward that end I've made some bookmarklets aimed at aiding the evaluation of webpages for accessibility by the disabled. The company I work with has agreed to host some of these accessibility bookmarklets and can provide more context to explain why this is important than is reasonable at bookmarklets.com. Of interest there also: a new way to keep bookmarklets, allowing many of them to be kept at a time.
Mar. 5 - I'm pulling yesterday's experiment prematurely because at the moment bookmarklets.com is not receiving email (critical for evaluating the experiment) - and I don't know what the problem is. There was a major earthquake here a few days ago - that could have something to do with it, but I don't know.
I have the obvious reservations* about asking for money, but beyond that, there are issues peculiar to bookmarklets.com; feedback from long-term users suggests that a donation of a dollar for these things would be understood as acceptable (it wouldn't come anywhere close to covering the actual cost of the site... but nonetheless) yet I worry that an appeal for money would discourage first-time users from trying a technology that is new (and ultimately beneficial to them). Maybe the experiment will be restarted later.
Mar. 4 - An experiment. Bookmarklets.com now has a "tip jar" - you can donate anywhere from $1 to $50 to the site. Amazon.com handles the credit card information. I'm trying to find some way to pay for an updated and expanded version of the site. Give if you want; if you don't, that's OK too.
Jan. 4 - Here's a second-generation search
bookmarklet:
Search Google... (Explorer 5+ and Netscape 6)
which sends selected text to Google. It accommodates both Explorer 5+ and Netscape 6 and it handles arbitrarily nested frames.
Handling frames is the hard part; first-generation
bookmarklets stop dead when an interior frame comes from
a different domain than that of the main page (which
happens more frequently now because of advertisements
in IFRAMEs). This uses the availability of
try...catch to ignore those frames.
(Note to scripters: this also demonstrates use of
try...catch instead of browser detection; you
try one kind of code and if it doesn't work you catch
the error and try some other code.)
