5typos.net
Bookmarklets for text manipulation
When I got an interview with Opera a year ago, I switched from Firefox 2 to Opera 9.5. Initially I thought that the “extensions withdrawal” was going to be hard but after a few days I realized that CoLT was the only one I really missed . Copy Link Text (CoLT) copies any text you select plus the URL where its located. This is great for blogging, saving links for research and answering emails that require a lot of links1.
Update: Welcome KFG Links and Minimal Mac Podcast visitors, glad you find the bookmarklets useful.
In case you’re also using Quix, you can add the group below to your Command File for improved versions of all the bookmarklets.
You can also grab my whole Command File, which incidentally I made following Merlin’s post.
Now, back to reruns.
Enter the Bookmarklets:
One of the reasons I didn’t miss extensions that much was because most services I was using where already bookmarkets (or had one). Bookmarkelts are basically bookmarks that perform an action with the content in your browser window.
Famous ones include: Share on Facebook, Tumblr and Bookmark on Delicious. My personal favorites are Read Later, Post with Tweetie and Readability.
In any case, after some head-scratching I modified some existing bookmarklets to make them work for me:
- Text Select: It grabs the text selected, the page URL and the page title and pop’s up a dialog box with the content you can easily copy. If no text is selected, you will get just the URL and the title.
If you select this very special text on a website and click on the bookmarklet you would get:
Page Title
http://website.com/address
this very special text
Markdown
I made a couple that format everything in markdown since I use it to blog and write most of my documents.
-
Markdown Text: page title link and selected text as quote.
[Page Title](http://website.com/address) >this very special text -
Markdown Link: selected text as link.
[this very special text](http://website.com/address) -
Markdown Title: you guessed it.
[Page Title](http://website.com/address)
All you have to do to save these bookmarklets is grab the underlined name and drop it in you bookmark bar. You can also right click and select save link to bookmarks in some browsers. In Opera, I assign shortcut to each one and just type tc on the URL bar to use it.
I hope somebody find these useful. They are a lifesaver for me.
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I usually get a “What (iPod/laptop/phone/camera/service/software) should I get?” email every couple of weeks. I love these emails because it gives me an excuse to figure out what’s going with different products. But you need to go through a lot of reviews and products pages. ↩︎