Comments on: Bookmarklets 101

By: Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:13:42 +0000

Thanks to inspiration from this article I created a bookmarklet that turns any page that links to MP3s into a full featured media player.

It's available here: http://grabb.it/pages/playable

Thanks to jQuery's controlled scope and some clever closure usage I don't leak anything but DOM Elements into the global scope. Thanks for the idea, I think the applications of this sort of thing are pretty much limitless.

By: Jadd

Jadd — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 10:24:49 +0000

Opera does let your make a bookmarklet into a button quite easily. Bookmark the link, and make sure you check the checkbox that says ’show in panel’. From there you can drag that button to wherever you want.

By: Dietrich Kappe

Dietrich Kappe — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 16:25:20 +0000

Derek,

those tricks and tips come next -- how to grab data from other sites without using XMLHttpRequest, how to grab data from the current site and use it for a self mashup, etc.

There's quite a bit that can be done even with the cross-site restriction. Stay tuned.

By: Derek

Derek — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:06:41 +0000

Dietrich, keep in mind that if you’re loading your “favorite Ajax library” you’ll still be subject to cross-site scripting restrictions. Thus, even though you can source your library from your domain you won’t be able to use XmlHttpRequest to communicate with that domain (because you’re considered part of the domain hosting the page into which your script has been injected).

John, check out Blue Dot (http://bluedot.us/), we are using this technique to collect bookmarking data.

By: John Munsch

John Munsch — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:55:21 +0000

One area I would love to see covered is the area of popups. I need to have a user login (potentially) and enter in some data after clicking on the bookmarklet.

This is an action that the user is driving by initiating the click so I should be able to popup a window over what he/she is doing. However, the window normally pops up behind the browser with the latest versions of Firefox. That's annoying.

I would love to find a way to bring up my own window in without it being something that someone else can exploit so it gets turned off by the browser somewhere down the line and my bookmarklet gets broken.