Make life a little easier with Bookmarklets

Jake Howlett, 2 April 2001

Category: Miscellaneous; Keywords: favourites bookmarks

What are Bookmarklets? As far as I can tell they are simply Bookmarks that use JavaScript or, as the "official" site puts it:

a tiny program (a JavaScript application) contained in a bookmark (the URL is a "javascript:" URL) which can be saved and used the same way you use normal bookmarks.

Yeah, yeah. Less talk, give us an example! Well here is one I've written that most of us Domino developers should find useful. Use the link below and enter a string that contains characters such as =, £, & etc in the prompt box. The next prompt box you see will be the string in its URL-encoded format. You can now copy this and then paste wherever you need.

URL-Encode a string

Wait though. This is not a Bookmarklet yet. To make it in to one you need to add it to your Favourites menu. Assuming you use IE, right click the link and choose "Add to favorites..", ignore any messages about it not being safe (trust me, it is). Now, whenever you need to check what the URL-encode is for a particular string is, you can do it straight from the Favourites menu of your browser. Cool.

The above Bookmarklet goes part way to demonstrating their power, but doesn't show that when you call a Bookmarklet it is being called "from" the page you are currently in. So from any web-page you can now do things like: Change background colour back to white (This page already is so click here to make it red), List all Email links, Email the location to a friend etc.

There are literally hundreds to choose from on Bookmarklets.com along with an explanation that should fill any of the gaps I'm sure to have left out.

So far the URL-Encode Bookmarklet is the only one I have dreamt up that I feel is worthy of sharing. As and when I think of others that we Domino developers could all use, I'll add them here.

Page designers conscious of accessibility issues and using IE5+ can take a look at what a page looks like without any stylesheets or what colour-blind people might see.

Finally, if you feel creative and start creating your own be sure to let us all know using the "Comment" link.

Note: IE5+ users who like the look of these can use this link to automatically import the following Bookmarklets:

URL-Encode
Set background to white
Remove stylesheets
Email location to a friend

in to a folder in your Favorites menu called "Bookmarklets" (you can always remove and rename them later). Alternatively just righ-click and add those you want to your bookmarks.