Bookmarklets: Tech Tuesday

Today’s entry is simple, if you already know what I’m talking about. If you don’t then the name ‘bookmarklet’ isn’t that helpful, especially if you use Internet Explorer where bookmarks are called favorites. Bookmarklets are buttons you drag to your links bar on your browser, that do something useful. This links bar is usually a grey bar found below the address bar. If you’ve just installed your browser it’ll have links to Microsoft, Mozilla or something similar on it. Here are a few of mine.

The easiest example to start with is the handy bookmarklet on the bit.ly site. If you visit there you should see there’s a bookmarklet on the right-hand side of the page. To add it to your browser, put the mouse cursor over the link then click – but keep the button depressed. Now drag the link up to the links bar. You should see something like a + sign, or similar. Now let go. What this bookmarklet will do is shorten URLs. This is very useful for Twitter. If you want to link to http://www.a-very-long-address.com/with/many/sub-directories/an-index.php?=and-if-thats-not-enough-a-complex-query-too then that’s a lot of characters. Bit.ly will reduce this to bit.ly/short or similar which saves a lot of letters.

Another example of a bookmarklet is one that Google Reader or Newsgator provide for adding RSS feeds to their online readers. Rather than having to work out the RSS feed address yourself and then typing it into the RSS reader’s site, these bookmarklets handle all that with one click.

They can also be used for sending images to places, activating social linking sites or all sorts of interactive links. But, while they’re not staggeringly difficult to use, it does help if you know what someone means if they refer to a bookmarklet.