Top 5 Favorite Bookmarklets

By Scott Loganbill

Bookmarklets are the JavaScript-enabled links you can pull into your bookmarks that interact with whatever page you find yourself on. The best bookmarklets act as you would typically expect a toolbar to, by extending your browsing experience. However, since they’re written in JavaScript, they all by working within the browser and without requiring installation.

Here are 5 highly recommended bookmarklets you can drag to your browser’s toolbar or to your bookmarks to extend your browsing experience.

• Note in Reader — Google Reader’s main function is to digest your favorite blog’s RSS feeds. However, its ’share’ and ’share with notes’ features have made the service far more useful on a social level. What do you do if you run across a site you want to ’share’ with your friends, but don’t want to sign up for its RSS feed to do it? Google’s bookmarklet lets you do that. Even better, the whole thing pops up in a cool in-page pop-up so you don’t have to disrupt your surfing.
• Share on FriendFeed — I include FriendFeed’s bookmarklet for the same reason I include Google Reader. However, for sites like Twitter, Facebook and even Google Reader (through RSS), FriendFeed lets you consolidate all your updates and notify them equally. So if you prefer not to use Facebook or Twitter, you can sign up for FriendFeed and update all of these accounts at the same time anyway.
• TwitterKeys — Sometimes, it’s hard to remember how to find that emoticon that expresses the exact mood you’re feeling. TwitterKeys pops up a list of useful zingbat-like icons you can embed in your Twitter messages. It’s even more useful than that since the little icons are based on a font most everyone has installed on their machines, so you can embed these quirky emoticons in any message you’d like — not just Twitter.
• Edit Current Page — This little bookmarklet is based on a HTML 5/JavaScript element that lets you change the text of any HTML page like you would a text document. Sure, it’s fun for practical jokes, but if you’re like me, you’ll want to use it to hide the personal data in websites for screenshots for presentations or blog posts. Because it is based on HTML 5, it only works in the latest versions of Firefox, Safari and Opera support the contentEditable JavaScript function.
• Bit.ly — The Bit.ly service will automatically shorten the URL of the page you are on in a nice embedded pop-up so you don’t have to leave the page or use copy and paste any more than you have to.
• Firebug Lite — Sometimes you feel like Firebug, sometimes you just want to know how wide a picture is without diving into the nuts and bolts. This is where XRay and Firebug Lite come in. These offer JavaScript bug tracking versions of the Firebug add-on. Since the bookmarklet is based on JavaScript, it works in any browser.

Granted, your list may differ. Your favorites may depend on which services you use the most. Del.icio.us, for example, offers a bookmarklet users of Del.icio.us should find useful. We can’t cover them all; There are a lot of Bookmarklets not included in this list. Let us know your favorites in the comments.

Original here