Bookmarklets

David Dorn discovers a very interesting slant on small JavaScripts that you can save as bookmarks in your favourite browser – this is really neat stuff!

While I was out on the Web, browsing various sites – as you do – I came across a few places that had obviously been designed by somebody with eyesight that was a few levels better then mine. They’d decided to use colour combinations that, to me, at any rate, were completely unreadable. I needed to set the background colour to White and text to Black, really in order to read what was on the page – but how to do it?

I decided to hit the search engines and type a few terms in in order to find a solution. I’ve recently started using metasearch engines to expand my searches from AOL’s Netfind to encompass a greater selection, and one site kept cropping up in every search engine that my searches hit – that was www.bookmarklets.com.

Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets are, simply, very small JavaScript programs that act on the Web page you’re viewing, or perform a function independently of your browser. At the moment, the only way I’ve been able to get them to work in the AOL browser is by actually having them on the page, but if you, like many of us, use Internet Explorer or Netscape in conjunction with your AOL connection for browsing Web sites, then you can easily make use of Bookmarklets.

In simple terms, you right click on the bookmarklet on the page, and save it as a favourite (in IE) or a bookmark (in Netscape). When you want to use the bookmarklet, you simply click on its entry either in your favourites or as a button your toolbar.

What do they do?

A bookmarklet can do all manner of things. Here’s a small collection that will work right here:

Last updated

This should show you when I actually uploaded this page to the server – handy if you’re not sure how often a Web site is updated (I use it a lot on home pages)

Change text colour

One of my favourites – I particularly like black text on a white background, but click this and type in “red” or “blue” and see what happens – very handy!

Change text to Arial

I can’t read Time Roman text all that well,  which is why Practical PC uses Verdana, but this bookmarklet will change the fonts to Arial – clicking it a second time changes it back. Very handy.

Highlight links

There’s a tendency to use stylesheets to remove the underline from links these days – this bookmarklet highlights links for you by marking them up with a yellow background.

As you can see, they’re very useful things. If you use either Netscape or Internet Explorer, I can heartily recommend that you navigate your way to www.bookmarklets.com and pick a few up, and have a search about for others.

As soon as we can find a way to make them work in AOL, I’ll let you know!

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David Dorn