Print
Because your friends need to know now
You just dropped your favorite sandwich on the floor while taking it out of the microwave. You’ve got to tell the world, quick! Click your Facebook bookmarklet and post the bad news instantly to your page, then sit back and wait for a slew of sad faces from the girls and insults from guys. People don’t believe you? Upload an iPhone picture of your destroyed turkey melt to Facebook, then use the Choose Thumbnail feature built into the bookmarklet interface to prove to people that you’re not just a liar looking for some online pity.
Get it right the first time
An unfortunate truth about passwords is, the more you get them wrong in one sitting, the more likely your browser is going to lock you out, whether you simply misspelled the password or not. Lucky for you, there’s a View Passwords bookmarklet that you can use any time you enter a password, to ensure you’ve spelled your secret service code without error. Access any website that requires a password, punch it in, then run View Passwords to ensure that it’s spelled absolutely correctly, so you can hit Login with complete confidence, no matter how much you’ve had to drink. We’re not judging.
Print only what you want
Ever try to print something from one of your favorite websites, only to find a jumbled mess of advertisements and pop-ups distracting you from the actual content (and using up substantially more ink)? Use the Click2Zap bookmarklet to selectively choose which parts of any given page you’d like to print, whether it’s a single image or an entire article. Activating Click2Zap will turn your mouse into a “deselection tool,” so to speak, allowing you to choose what you don’t want to print by dragging a large yellow window across irrelevant information. Not happy with your (de) selection? Hit Undo at the top-right corner and give it another go. When you’re done, hit Print, and save yourself some grief, and some ink!
Enjoy online articles at your leisure
Read It Later is a web service that allows you to save and consolidate unread articles and come back to them whenever you’d like. To get the most out of the service, you need a fast, simple way to add articles to your queue, and the Read It Later bookmarklet provides just that. Simply click it whenever you want to save an article, and it’ll be waiting for you next time you visit the Read It Later site.
So far, we’ve tried to keep from cluttering up this list with a lot of bookmarklets that are essentially glorified search bars. These make up a large chunk of the bookmarklets available, and all work in essentially the same way:
1. Save [service x]'s search bookmarklet
2. Highlight some text, and click the bookmarklet
3. Be whisked away to [service x]'s page, automatically searching for the highlighted text.
We haven’t included these because they’re all basically the same, and kind of boring, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very useful. Here’s a list of our five most commonly used search bookmarklets:
Wikipedia: Keeping this bookmarklet handy makes it easier than ever to be a know-it-all online.
IMDB: Unfamiliar with the actor or movie mentioned in the blog post you just read? Look it up on IMDB.
Google Images: Can’t remember what color a giraffe’s tongue is? If you had this bookmarklet you could just highlight “giraffe’s tongue” and find out.
Acronym and Abbreviation Finder: Another one that comes up often when surfing the web. Clarifies any confusing abbreviation in a flash.
Urban Dictionary: Sometimes you need to learn about words that aren’t in the regular dictionary. Next time you catch yourself wondering what it actually means to ghost ride a whip, you know what to use.
There are more than 30 bookmarklets on our list, and there’s hundreds more available online. That’s a problem. Why? Because you can fit only about 10 or so on your bookmarks bar before it becomes a complete mess. Fortunately, there are ways to keep lots of bookmarklets organized. Here are three quick tips:
Organize your bookmarklets into folders. Bookmarklets work just as well in folders as they do on your browser’s bookmarks bar, so sort them into logical groups like “Search Bars” and “Writing Resources.”
Keep your bookmarklets on the cloud. Bookmark-syncing applications like Xmarks usually work with bookmarklets, so you can make sure you’ve got your browser toolbox available to you wherever you go.
Rename your bookmarklets. Changing a bookmarklet’s name won’t break it, and may make it shorter or easier for you to remember.
Comments are closed on this article
Dennis Hully
September 09, 2010 at 3:58pm
I can download files, however, I can't play them. What media player recognizes these file extensions?
shoalcreek5
December 04, 2010 at 11:09pm
Most any media player can play .mp4 files. VLC player from videolan.org will play almost any movie file, including .flv as long as you have the necessary codecs installed.
bllreyn
July 25, 2010 at 9:18pm
Grooveselect works for me. Didn't work at first and then I realized that Noscript was blocking it. Once I allowed it I had to highlight the song again and click the bookmarklet.
nattybohman
July 21, 2010 at 7:51pm
It's a shame too. After reading the article, the one I was most excited about was Grooveselect and the bookmarklet doesn't even work.
Did you guys test this stuff before writing the article?
At least I found out about the website Grooveshark.com - very cool site.
dougarb
July 08, 2010 at 3:37pm
but thanks for the tip on grooveshark, i seemed to have missed that one
great selection, even charlie patton, and sun ra and jelly roll morton
Watcher
July 03, 2010 at 3:29pm
Hello to all my fellow brethren: The Bookmarklet - GrooveSelect; Does anyone know how to query the server without having to find the song you want to listen on a page?. So, I'm looking for a way to manually enter a song and artist, then I can highlight the sound and then hit the GrooveSelect BookMarklet. Search boxes do not seem to do the job? Thanks for any and all replies.
Bwana
June 30, 2010 at 9:41pm
GMapToGPX bookmarklet will create a GPX file from a Google Maps route so you can upload it to your GPS. Very primo.
DReborn
June 28, 2010 at 11:54am
I dragged the grooveselect bookmarklet into my firefox bookmark toolbar, highlight a song text I want to hear (use sombody - Kings of Leon), and then click the grooveselect bookmarket. Nothing happens.
any ideas? fully updated FF
gregparsns
June 06, 2010 at 6:58pm
Perfect for when you are surfing around and want to tell someone (or yoursef) about a page you just found.
No need to bring up full on Gmail, just po up a small Gmail This window.
I learned of it here http://lifehacker.com/190122/gmail-this-bookmarklet
flatlinebb
June 04, 2010 at 11:06pm
You don't mention the link in the article, and there is no official bookmarklet on LMGTFY website. Double FAIL!
Sparx10
June 05, 2010 at 3:14am
LetMeGoogleThatForYou <--- That's the bookmarklet right there, just select text and press it. It's not very useful though, because it just searches the highlighted text on LMGTFY and doesn't give a link. I think it's just better to go to the site and make your own URL.
JoeBobJohn
June 02, 2010 at 7:35pm
I love the PwnYouTube bookmarklet! However the article linked to the main page rather than the bookmarklet. This is the direct link to get the bookmarklet for downloading videos from YouTube
http://deturl.com/bookmarklet-to-directly-download-videos-from-youtube.asp
By the way, it also works on DailyMotion and Facebook.
Sparx10
June 02, 2010 at 7:26pm
GrooveSelect is AWESOME :D It even found these semi-rare German rock (not Rammstein :P).
Try these (if you like hard rock then you'll probably like these :D)
1. Oomph! - Du Spielst Gott
2. Oomph! - Beim Ersten Mal Tut's Immer Weh
3. Oomph! - Ego
4. Oomph! - Träumst Du
And no, they don't sing about the devil, Hitler, or nazism like everyone stereotypes -.-
herrleelee
June 02, 2010 at 3:56pm
Is it me or some of these do not work with chrome, for example vozme and switter.
Danielt876
June 02, 2010 at 12:13pm
The password one seems a little useless, if you were really that bad with typing your passwords then you could just type them into the search bar, or address bar, then copy and paste it into the password box.
wootwoot
June 02, 2010 at 11:05am
Nice list. I stumbled across http://www.marklets.com
the other day. I think it's probably the biggest list of bookmarklets I've ever
seen. I found the marklets.com bookmarklet (mentioned in the article) http://www.marklets.com/bookmarklets/Marklets.com.aspx the most useful. It lets you just search their database right from the
sites you're currently visiting. Pretty cool trick and you don't need
to bookmark a huge list of bookmarklets.
morphar
June 02, 2010 at 5:57am
Thank you for mentioning my project: slapnotes.com
And thank you for a great article, with some great bookmarklets! :-)
Best regards
Dan
---------------------------------------------------------
Slapnotes.com - stop bookmarking, start slapping notes
